Sartre, Jean Paul Literary And Philosophical Essays ( Collier, 1962)

The Transcendence of the Ego

First published in France in 1937 as a journal article, The Transcendence of the
Ego was one of Jean-Paul Sartre's earliest philosophical publications. When it
appeared, Sartre was still largely unknown, working as a school teacher in
provincial France and struggling to find a publisher for his most famous fictional
work, Nausea.

The Transcendence of the Ego is the outcome of Sartre's intense engagement
with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Here,
as in many subsequent writings, Sartre embraces Husserl' s vision of
phenomenology as the proper method for philosophy. But he argues that
Husserl's conception of the self as an inner entity, 'behind' conscious experience
is mistaken and phenomenologically unfounded.

The Transcendence of the Ego offers a brilliant diagnosis of where Husserl
went wrong, and a radical alternative account of the self as a product of
consciousness, situated in the world.

This essay introduces many of the themes central to Sartre's major work,
Being and Nothingness: the nature of consciousness, the problem of self-
knowledge, other minds, anguish. It demonstrates their presence and importance
in Sartre's thinking from the very outset of his career.

This fresh translation makes this classic work available again to students of
Sartre, phenomenology, existentialism, and twentieth century philosophy. It
includes a thorough and illuminating introduction by Sarah Richmond, placing
Sartre's essay in its philosophical and historical context.

Translated by Andrew Brown, University of Cambridge.

Jean-Paul Sartre

The Transcendence of the Ego

A sketch for a phenomenological
description

Translated by Andrew Brown
With an introduction by Sarah Richmond

London and New York

La transcendence de I 'Ego

© Libraire Philosophique J.Vrin, Paris, 1988

First published 2004
by Routledge

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Translation © Routledge 2004

Introduction © Sarah Richmond 2004

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in London by the Institut Francais du Royanne-Uni.

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CONTENTS

Introduction by Sarah Richmond v

The Transcendence of the Ego 1

I. The I and the me 1

II. The constitution of the Ego 12

Conclusion 24

Notes 3 1

Index 42

INTRODUCTION

Sarah Richmond

Jean-Paul Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego (hereafter TE) first appeared as
an article in the French academic journal, Recherches Philosophiques in 1937. It
was among Sartre's first philosophical publications, the outcome of a period of
intense critical engagement with the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund
Husserl (1859-1938). Sartre had become interested in phenomenology earlier in
the 1930s and devoted much of the year (1933/4) that he spent as a scholar in the
French Institute in Berlin to a close study of Husserl's writings. At the time, the
publication of TE was an event of minor significance, making available to an
academic franco-phone readership a brief contribution by a young school-teacher
to a debate which (although its topic — the self — was of central philosophical
importance) was conducted here within the esoteric idiom of phenomenology.

From today's standpoint, the historical importance of TE massively compounds
its inherent philosophical interest, and this excellent new translation by Andrew
Brown provides a welcome opportunity to re-examine it. TE demonstrates the
presence in Sartre's thinking from its earliest stage of ideas which, although not
yet consciously entertained as such, were to become central tenets within his
existentialist philosophy. Sartre's hostility to a conception of the self as an
'inner' entity at the core of individual human beings, playing an explanatory role
in relation to their experience, is clearly conveyed in TE, along with his rejection
of any psychology that trades on such a conception. Sartre's own conception of
consciousness as 'absolute', insubstantial, and transparent is also voiced here,
and his negative attitude towards Freudian psychoanalysis, based on its denial of
these features, is briefly expressed.

TE also provides the first instance in print of Sartre's attempt to define his
relationship with one of his most important early interlocutors, Husserl.
Recollecting, a few years later, the period in the early 1930s when he immersed
himself in Husserl's phenomenological writings, Sartre wrote in his War Diaries
that before he could move on to study Martin Heidegger's philosophy, he had
first to exhaust Husserl's thinking. 'For me, moreover, to exhaust a philosophy is
to reflect within its perspectives, and create my own private ideas at its expense,
until I plunge into a blind alley' (Sartre 1984, pp. 183-4). TE provides an
excellent example of the parasitic creativity to which Sartre refers. And despite

its moments of undeniable brilliance, one can glimpse, now and again, at least
the threat of a blind alley.

The opening pages of TE do not focus in the first instance on Husserl. The
problem of the self with which Sartre is concerned belongs to philosophy quite
generally, and Sartre's bold initial declaration of intent is stated in general terms:
T should like to show here that the Ego is neither formally nor materially in
consciousness: it is outside, in the world; it is a being in the world, like the Ego
of another' (p. 1 in this volume; hereafter simple page nos. in parentheses will
refer to pages in this volume).

Sartre suggests that the view he is contesting is widely held: he attributes it, in
this first paragraph, not only to 'most philosophers', but also to 'psychologists'.
Nonetheless, and notwithstanding Sartre's use of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
as a way in to his problem, it soon becomes clear that his main opponent is
Husserl.

This is indicated, too, by the title of Sartre's essay. Sartre's use of the term
'transcendence' follows Husserl' s, and refers to an opposition central to
Husserl's thought. In Husserl's usage, an object of consciousness is 'immanent'
if all its parts are contained within a single conscious experience. A sensation,
for example, is 'inherent' within consciousness: it is presented in its entirety,
'lived through', as Husserl puts it. A 'transcendent' object, on the other hand, has
aspects some of which always exceed — 'transcend' — a particular experience of
it. Material objects are transcendent in this sense: visual perception, for example,
cannot present a material object 'all at once', but only perspectivally. Looked at
from the front, the back of the object remains unseen.

Sartre claims, more controversially, that the Ego is also transcendent, that it is
not an 'inhabitant' of consciousness. The title, moreover, lends itself to a double
reading that it is possible Sartre meant to exploit. The 'transcendence of the Ego'
is the essay's subject matter: Sartre wishes to establish that the Ego is
transcendent. At the same time it can be understood as an activity that Sartre is
recommending. In the ordinary sense of 'transcend', in which it simply means 'to
go beyond', Sartre is urging his readers to transcend the Ego that philosophers
have wrongly imposed on us.

TE has two parts. In the first, negative part, Sartre's procedure accords with
the passage from his War Diaries: he 'exhausts' what Husserl has to offer, and
thinks 'at his expense'. Sartre takes up Husserl's account of the transcendental
Ego, in order to argue that Husserl's own thinking ought not to have admitted it.
In the second part of the essay, Sartre offers, in place of Husserl's false
conception, a positive account of the 'constitution' of the Ego.

A brief survey of the main elements of Husserl's phenomenological approach
that Sartre takes up in TE will help at this point to clarify his strategy of internal
critique.

HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGY

It is important to note that although the term 'phenomenology' is used today to
denote a movement within European philosophy (whose 'classical' period begins
with the work of Franz Brentano in the late nineteenth century, and spans the first
forty years or so of the twentieth), this was not how Husserl saw it. For Husserl,
phenomenology was the only possible form that genuine philosophical enquiry
could take: the proposed methodology was the only way, Husserl contended, that
philosophy could proceed 'as a rigorous science'. In many of his writings Husserl
laments, just as Kant had before him, the lack of a rationally grounded and
universally recognizable basis for philosophy. The 'radical new beginning'
Husserl delineates aims to make good this lack.

The central claim in Husserl's later conception of phenomenology is that this
new beginning requires an important shift in perspective on the philosopher's
part, which detaches him from his habitual, everyday outlook, that of the 'natural
attitude'. In the natural attitude we unhesitatingly accept the 'givenness' of the
world around us, and of the many types of objects it contains. We experience
ourselves as human subjects in the world, alongside other humans as well as non-
human animals. As Husserl puts it, '[the world] is continually "on hand" for me
and I myself am a member of it' (1982:53). Husserl holds moreover that in the
natural attitude we are continuously engaged in acts of 'positing' the world and
its contents; in other words, and whether or not we explicitly express beliefs to
this effect, we regard the world and the objects within it, as existing, or actual.

The shift in perspective that Husserl prescribes involves a retreat from these
unquestioned existential beliefs: the philosopher parenthesizes them, or puts them
out of action. This operation is reminiscent of Descartes's 'method of doubt', and
Husserl repeatedly acknowledges Descartes's inspirational example, but it is not
identical. The existential beliefs in question are not doubted, or negated, but
rather suspended: no use may be made of them. For this exercise, Husserl bor-
rows the Greek term epoche (which is used in ancient sceptical discussions to
refer to 'suspension of judgement' and, outside philosophy, literally translates as
'check' or 'hindrance').

The epoche, according to Husserl, opens up the philosopher's proper domain
of enquiry: his own 'pure consciousness', which remains available as an object
of study even after all assumptions about the existence of the world and its
contents have been bracketed. Like Descartes, Husserl regards the experience of
one's own conscious states as indubitable: as Husserl often puts it, such
experience provides evidence that is apodictic, whose falsity is inconceivable.
Although I may doubt whether an experience accurately represents reality, I
cannot doubt the experience as an appearance or 'phenomenon'.

Husserl often describes the epoche as the gateway to a 'new region of being',
a region that the natural attitude typically obstructs from view. 'As long as the
possibility of the phenomenological attitude had not been recognized,' he writes,

'the phenomenological world had to remain unknown, indeed, hardly even
suspected' (1982:66). The task for the philosopher, once he has entered this
region, is to describe what he finds there, given in the ongoing stream of his
conscious states. (With this undertaking, Husserl's project diverges from
Descartes's.) Husserl believes that the systematic investigation of the field of 'pure
consciousness' can uncover essential truths about the nature of experience. Thus,
as Husserl illustrates, the structure of any experience of a material object can be
explicated, as can the experience of another mind. The retreat from the natural
attitude allows the philosopher to reconstruct what it is for us to 'have' a world.

Simone de Beauvoir records in her memoirs the tremendous excitement that
Sartre's encounter with Husserl's ideas produced in him. Phenomenology
examined our experience of the world, and promised to illuminate it without
either naivete or dogma. Sartre refers to it respectfully in TE as 'a scientific...
study of consciousness', 'proceeding... via intuition', which 'puts us in the
presence of the thing' (p. 4). At the time of writing TE, Sartre was also working
on a first novel — but whose title at that point was 'A Factum on fictional project
that was eventually published as Nausea — his Contingency'. Phenomenology
could not have been more relevant to Sartre's central concern, in both his
philosophical and his fictional work of the time, with the relationship between
consciousness and the world.

Yet, Sartre complains in TE, a rigorous use of the phenomenological method
does not uncover the transcendental I (or 'pure Ego', as Husserl more commonly
puts it) that Husserl locates at the heart of conscious experience. Sartre accuses
Husserl of an unnecessary duplication of selves; the worldly 'psycho-physical'
self that, Husserl claims, we normally have in mind when we talk of our 'self
poses no problem. But, Sartre rhetorically asks, 'is this psychical and psycho-
physical me not sufficient?' (p. 5). Why double it, as Husserl does, with a further,
'inner' self, a transcendental I? Moreover, Sartre suggests, Husserl's own, self-
imposed methodological constraint — his epoche — ought to rule out any such
transcendental I.

THE EGO AND THE EPOCHE: SARTRE'S INTERNAL
CRITIQUE

Husserl does indeed seem to speak of 'two' selves, with different names: an
empirical or 'psychological' self and a 'pure' or transcendental Ego. The
operation of the epoche clarifies the distinction between them. In ordinary life,
unreflectively immersed within 'the natural attitude', a person may speak
unproblematically about her 'self (or those of others). This discourse refers to the
psychological self, attributed to a human person, situated within the world. This
worldly self figures of course within our existential beliefs (it provides the
subject matter of psychology) and must therefore get bracketed by the epoche.
After the epoche, however, when the philosopher surveys the field of 'pure
consciousness', Husserl maintains that a pure Ego — the subject of consciousness

— is disclosed there. Drawing on a visual metaphor, Husserl suggests that the
pure Ego's presence in every conscious process is like a 'regard' that traverses it.
'This ray of "regard" changes from one cogito to the next, shooting forth anew with
each new cogito... The Ego, however, is something identical' (1982: 132). For
Husserl, this pure Ego is encountered 'as a residuum after our
phenomenological exclusion of the world and of the empirical subjectivity
included in it' (p. 133).

This finding, Sartre objects, is inconsistent with Husserl's methodology. The
point of the epoche, as Sartre understands it, is that it circumscribes a realm of
which we can have certain knowledge. (Sartre's reading emphasizes the
Cartesian strand in Husserl's thinking, in which the driving force of enquiry is
the need to secure 'apodictic' evidence. In doing so, he neglects the numerous
passages in Husserl's writing where this concern recedes, or is questioned.)
Now, Sartre insists, this certainty can extend only to what is wholly given, or
immanent, within the 'moment' of consciousness surveyed in the reflective act.
Yet the being of the pure Ego outstrips that of any of its conscious states;
Husserl explicitly states that it is identical throughout the stream of experience.
It is therefore, Sartre argues, just like my psychological Ego (or anyone else's, for
that matter) transcendent: an 'existent', presented to consciousness. If the epoche
excludes any transcendent being, then no Ego, pure or psychological, can
legitimately be included within a post-epoche consciousness.

Husserl's distinction between two sorts of Ego is not supposed to imply that
each exists independently of the other. Rather, he holds that the relationship
between the pure and the psychological Ego is that the latter is the outcome of a
process of constitution. Self-constitution: the pure Ego, through a process of
'self-obj edification', comes to regard itself as part of the world. Now Sartre
wholeheartedly agrees that the worldly self is 'constituted': this doctrine,
formulated at this stage of his career in phenomenological terms, survives,
overlaid with existentialist vocabulary, in his later insistence that, in the case of
human beings, 'existence precedes essence'. But, Sartre insists, constituting
consciousness must be regarded as impersonal: 'personhood' only enters the
scene as the outcome of an 'anonymous' process of constitution. Husserl, Sartre
suggests, ought to have stopped at one Ego, the psychological 'worldly' one:
there is no other, and, Sartre believes, no other is needed.

THE TRANSPARENCY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

So speaks Sartre the conscientious phenomenologist, out-doing Husserl in his
fidelity to the epoche, rejecting the transcendental I as gratuitous and
unwarranted. Accompanying him, however, and sporadically interrupting, is a
far less sober character, outraged by the very thought of such an I. Were it to
exist, Sartre claims, it would be dangerous: 'it would violently separate
consciousness from itself, it would divide it, slicing through each consciousness
like an opaque blade. The transcendental I is the death of consciousness' (p. 7).

For Sartre, to allow either substance or opacity within consciousness is to
compromise its absolute status. From its nature as an 'absolute' it follows, in
Sartre's eyes, that '[consciousness... cannot be limited except by itself (p. 7),
or subject to any law but its own. A transcendental I would in effect govern
consciousness and, Sartre says with distaste, render it 'heavy and ponderable" (p.
9). Even to characterize it as the source of conscious experience would conflict
with a truth about consciousness that, Sartre claims, we 'know' : 'nothing except
consciousness can be the source of consciousness' (p. 15).

As Sartre's language indicates, he regards these claims about consciousness —
its spontaneity, translucency, autonomy — as unquestionable. They reappear,
often verbatim, in the major work of 1943 in which his early phenomenological
writings culminated: Being and Nothingness. (By that point, Sartre had clarified
what was at stake: the possibility of human freedom.) But are they
phenomenologically grounded? As many critics have pointed out, it is doubtful,
even in Husserl's case, whether the framework of his enquiry justifies his
attribution of a distinctive, 'non-natural' type of being to consciousness. In the
case of Sartre, whose adherence to the phenomenological method is less
systematic, the doubt is greater still. Why should we assent to his description of
consciousness as absolute, spontaneous, self-limiting, and so on? Although
Sartre assures us that we know these truths, he does not show us how. The role of
phenomenology appears at this point to be only ancillary: where 'evidence' can
be found, its function is to persuade the reader of metaphysical convictions that
Sartre holds independently and unshakeably. Phenomenology seems to be led by
metaphysics, rather than vice versa: this tendency, by Being and Nothingness,
had become more pronounced.

THE NON-TRANSPARENCY OF REFLECTION

Sartre appeals to the epoche to convict Husserl's account of a transcendental I of
inconsistency. Yet the account he offers in TE of the source of Husserl's mistake
raises questions about the validity and possibility of knowledge derived from
reflection that threaten the phenomenological method in its entirety. In TE, one
of Sartre's earliest phenomenological texts, one already finds tensions in Sartre's
'corrective' appropriation of Husserl's method that are never fully resolved.

Having denied Husserl the right to locate an I within consciousness, Sartre sets
out to explain the appearances. For he concedes that there are experiences in
which an T features. In this, Descartes and Husserl were right: 'it is undeniable
that the Cogito is personal. In the "I think", there is an I which thinks' (p. 9). Their
mistake, however, was to misinterpret this encounter with an I as an encounter
with a self that had been there all along. But, Sartre points out, the experience of
the Cogito is always reflective: consciousness 'discovers' its personal being only
when it reflects upon itself. And Sartre's ingenious suggestion is that the
'discovery' of personal being, understood as pre-existing the act of reflection, is
an illusion. The reflective attitude, rather than discovering the self, creates it:

'might it not be precisely the reflective act which brings the me into being in
reflected consciousness?' (p. 11).

On Sartre's account, the reflective attitude is far from reliable. Although it is
associated with the idea of 'transparency', there is nothing mirror-like about it: it
alters the 'data' that it surveys. In TE Sartre does not provide an explanation of
how this occurs: how can a shift in attitude result in the creation of a new entity?
Further, he seems to move between the more radical charge that reflection
misleadingly modifies the nature of consciousness and a much weaker
complaint, that its findings may be less than certain.

Sartre's early criticisms of reflection express a distrust of it as a means of
gaining self-knowledge that recurs throughout his writings, literary as well as
philosophical. Sartre's aversion to the 'inner life' goes hand in hand with his
sense that the means typically used to apprehend it — introspection — is, at best,
unreliable and often dishonest. In fact, as he tells us in his Conclusion, his
account of consciousness implies that there is no 'inner life' (p. 43) and thereby
discredits people's attempts to monitor it: 'Doubts, remorse, the so-called "crises
of consciousness", etc., in short all of the material of people's diaries become mere
representations' (p. 43). (Sartre's sarcastic tone here prefigures his cynical
description of 'sincerity', in Being and Nothingness, as a form of bad faith.)
Even in his own War Diaries where, as one might expect, Sartre adopts a more
positive attitude towards self-scrutiny, his reservations about it are not
abandoned. But, he writes in 1939, wartime diary -keeping counts as a special
case: 'It simply seems to me that on the occasion of some great event, when one
is in the process of changing one's life like a snake sloughing its skin, one can
look at that dead skin. . .and take one's bearings. After the war, I shall no longer
keep this diary, or if I do I shall no longer speak about myself in it' (1984:139).

In TE, Sartre argues that a distinction needs to be made between 'pure' and
'impure' reflection. Although he does not state this explicitly, the distinction
allows one to understand Husserl's 'mistake' as an instance of 'impure'
reflection. (And it also provides a basis for scepticism about introspection.) The
error that defines impure reflection is that it goes beyond what is 'given' in the
'instantaneous consciousness' (p. 22) reflected upon, it 'affirms more than it
knows': it extends its claims to objects that appear 'through' that moment of
consciousness, but are not wholly contained within it. The hatred of Peter that I
may discern in myself, Sartre suggests, can appear only within the perspective of
impure reflection, because my state of hatred is understood as outlasting my
current encounter with it. 'After all,' Sartre comments, T have hated Peter for a
long time and I think I always will hate him' (p. 22). Pure reflection, limited to
the instant and thereby free of error, would entitle me only to say that 'I feel at this
moment a violent revulsion towards Peter' (p. 22). This corrective potential of
pure reflection vis-a-vis impure reflection echoes Sartre's 'correction' of Husserl
in relation to the self.

Does Sartre, then, identify his own method with that of pure reflection?
Interestingly, in TE, this does not seem to be the case; in fact, as we will see,

Sartre says remarkably little about his own methodology. But there are
difficulties in the idea of pure reflection that Sartre, in TE, does not seem to
notice.

One difficulty relates to the concept of the 'instantaneous', on which the
distinction between pure and impure reflection turns. For Sartre, the
'instantaneous moment' circumscribes the domain of certainty within the
reflective attitude. But isn't the 'instant', encroached upon on either side by past
and future instants, a vanishing point? This difficulty, of course, also threatens
Husserl's identification of the domain of 'apodictic' evidence with what is given
in the present moment of consciousness. (Ironically, though, Husserl seems to
have been more aware of the problem: he devotes an entire section (§9) of the
Cartesian Meditations to the 'urgent' problem of the range of the apodictic
evidence of the Cogito.) Sartre's complaint, against Husserl, that the epoche,
rigorously practised, ought to exclude the I from the domain of certainty invites a
question about what results one might expect from Sartre's own, 'purified'
method of enquiry. Can pure reflection deliver any certain knowledge about
consciousness, or will it turn out that any putative object of reflection will exceed
its bounds?

Thus Sartre's criticism of Husserl rebounds against his own thinking. This
self-ensnaring structure has of course become familiar more recently through the
late-twentieth-century 'deconstructive' writings of Jacques Derrida, whose early
philosophical engagement with phenomenology compares fascinatingly with
Sartre's. Both Sartre and Derrida, early in their philosophical careers, take on the
hugely influential figure of Husserl, and both challenge his thinking by means of
internal critique. Indeed, the doctrine of the pure Ego attracts both their
attention: amusingly, one of Sylvie le Bon's notes (reproduced here) to the 1965
publication, by Vrin, of TE in book form, draws the reader's attention to a
journal article published in 1963 by a little-known philosopher, 'M. Derrida',
where Husserl's account of the transcendental I is further discussed (p. 58, note
26).

A second difficulty arises from Sartre's conception of consciousness (noted
earlier) as 'absolute', and free of opacity. We saw that this conception, for
Sartre, is incompatible with the 'substantiality' of a transcendental I, and that this
thought played a part in Sartre's opposition to the latter. Sartre also insists that the
translucency of consciousness is incompatible with the existence of division
within it (and this thought underlies his rejection of Freud). But the difficulty for
pure reflection is that it seems also, unavoidably, to introduce a division within
consciousness insofar as its structure makes of consciousness an object to itself.

Sartre describes, in TE, the 'alteration' that reflection brings about in
consciousness: prior to reflection, consciousness always involves 'consciousness
of itself, but non-positionally (p. 10). With reflection, consciousness becomes
positional, by virtue of the fact that it directs itself towards itself. But this 'self-
positing' installs a division between the 'reflective' and 'reflected' aspects of
consciousness. As Sartre puts it: 'the consciousness which says "I think" is

precisely not the consciousness that thinks. Or rather, it is not its own thought
that it posits by this thetic act' (p. 10). At this point in the text, he is explaining
how, by virtue of this dislocation from itself, reflective consciousness can, as it
were, 'accrue' an I that it would be false to attribute to unreflected consciousness.
But the trouble is that reflection in general requires an act of 'positing', so the
dislocation must affect pure reflection too. The problem, then, seems not so
much to be one of whether the thinker 'affirms more than he knows' but whether
there is anything that he can 'know' about himself. It appears to be impossible to
spell out the 'consciousness of itself that Sartre attributes to pre-reflective
consciousness — to transform it into self-knowledge — without destroying it.

We will never know how far Sartre appreciated these difficulties when he
wrote TE, but they persist in his later writings. Sartre struggles at several points
in Being and Nothingness with the topic of self-knowledge. Famously, while he
had no difficulty in characterizing the 'bad faith' inherent in everyday self-
understanding, he was obliged to postpone any account of good faith, claiming in
a much-quoted footnote that its description 'has no place here' (2003:70).

PHENOMENOLOCY WITHOUT REFLECTION?

It is remarkable that, alongside the account of pure reflection that Sartre outlines
in TE, a quite different methodology altogether is briefly described, and
employed. For Sartre does not merely claim that the I is a product of reflective
consciousness. Audaciously, he tries in addition to demonstrate its absence from
un reflective consciousness. But how can he do this, without recourse to
reflection? Sartre, simply, attempts to show how. Through memory, he suggests,
an experience may be subtly retrieved without being 'posited' or otherwise
disturbed. 'All that is required... is to try and reconstitute the complete moment
in which this unreflected consciousness appeared', Sartre tells us, and adds, in a
reassuring parenthesis, that 'this is, by definition, always possible' (p. 11). The
key to success in this operation is that one must reconstitute the moment that has
just passed without altering the direction of one's gaze. Applying this subtle
technique to the example of reading a book, Sartre learns that 'while I was
reading, there was a consciousness of the book, of the heroes... but the I did not
inhabit this consciousness' (p. 12).

The tension in this endeavour is clear. Perhaps spontaneous memories,
unsolicited, demonstrate that there are occasions in everyday life when we
'relive' earlier experiences, just as they were. But can the same constancy in
point of view be claimed for an experience that is deliberately retrieved (for the
purpose, in this case, of a philosophical demonstration) ? Does not the
distinction, implicit in Sartre's description of the process, between the
'reconstituting' consciousness and the 'reconstituted' state cast fatal doubt on his
claim to have steered clear of reflection?

Sartre acknowledges that the 'result' he has secured by these means is, insofar
as it depends on memory, fallible. It lacks the certainty of phenomenological

reflection. But — the lesson of the I shows — the danger with the latter is that
illegitimate claims to that 'certainty' can all too easily arise. In TE, Sartre moves
between different phenomenological methodologies without committing himself
exclusively to just one. The influence of Heidegger (whose enormous differences
with Husserl we cannot go into here) makes itself felt alongside Husserl's, as if
they were compatible. (This syncretic attitude, already present in Sartre's
earliest philosophical publications, is a hallmark of his intellectual personality
throughout his career.) Despite the frequent methodological discussions in
Sartre's 'phenomenological' writings of the 1930s, the conception of
phenomenology he wishes to endorse in this period is unstable and never fully
defined. But the early doubts about Husserl, expressed in TE, seem to have
grown: by Being and Nothingness, interestingly, the epoche has dropped out of
the picture completely.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE EGO

Having ruled out the possibility of locating an I within consciousness, Sartre
undertakes, in the second part of TE, to give an account of how the Ego he does
admit — a 'transcendent' Ego, 'outside, in the world" (p. 1) — is constituted. As
this Ego, we have seen, only appears with the reflective attitude, the constitutive
processes Sartre describes are also located at the level of reflection. This might
suggest that Sartre's standpoint is second-order (pure?) reflection, but Sartre
does not clarify this.

Sartre claims that transcendent entities of three different types enter into the
constitution of the Ego: states, qualities and actions. He explains in the following
three sections how each of these is constituted in relation to consciousness, and
suggests that the role of the Ego is to unify them. The Ego is a 'transcendent pole
of synthetic unity', to which these psychological entities are related (p. 21).
Sartre's use of such phrases, and his taxonomic procedure, appear conventionally
phenomenological. Nothing prepares the reader for Sartre's statement, at the end
of his discussion of states, that the link between a state like hatred and the
experience in which it appears is magical. Moreover, he adds, 'it is in
exclusively magical terms that we have to describe the relations between the me
and consciousness' (p. 26).

These relations are 'magical' because ordinary causal thinking cannot
accommodate them. Sartre emphasizes repeatedly, in the second part of TE, the
'unintelligibility' of our conception of the Ego, which arises, he suggests, from
an incompatibility in its elements. Simply put, Sartre's point is that the nature of
subjectivity cannot be captured within a conceptual framework suitable for
worldly objects. And an important part of his reason for thinking this is that
consciousness has a unique and distinctive type of being. Objects that enter into
causal relations reciprocally limit and define each other: their being is inert and
relative, Sartre holds, while that of consciousness is absolute and spontaneous.
The Ego (and its component parts) are supposed to explain our experience. We

invoke a 'state' such as hatred to explain, in causal terms, an episode of
behaviour: 'Why were you so unpleasant to Peter?' 'Because I detest him.' (p.
25). Yet at the same time (pure) reflection leaves us certain of the spontaneity of
consciousness, and thereby invalidates the explanatory hypothesis: conscious
episodes of 'disgust' cannot be the effect of hatred. Hence the need for 'magic' in
our self-understanding. In place of an inapplicable causal understanding of the
relation between a state and an episode of consciousness, we rely, Sartre says, on
the illogical concept of 'emanation': the episode of disgust is not an effect of
hatred, but its emanation.

'Emanation' {emanation in French), belongs in both languages to Christian
theological vocabulary, specifically to an element in the doctrine of the Holy
Trinity. Both Son and Holy Spirit are said to 'proceed' from God the Father by
way of emanation. If this were the only item of religious vocabulary in TE, one
might think its appearance accidental. In fact Sartre draws, without inhibition or
comment, on a wide range of theological notions: the Ego creates itself ex nihilo
(p. 32), relates to its states by a kind of procession (p. 33), and maintains its
qualities by 'a veritable continuous creation' (p. 32).

Sartre's use of this religious vocabulary, in addition to his frequent references
to magic and witchcraft in the second part of TE, raises fascinating interpretative
questions. What status does Sartre, an atheist, accord to these theological
concepts? What role can phenomenology, understood as a 'scientific study of
consciousness', find for magic in the constitution of an intelligible world? The
reader of TE, leaving behind the confined Husserlian parameters of part one, is
largely expected to decide these questions for herself.

Various possibilities suggest themselves. In moving freely between magic and
theology, Sartre may provocatively be suggesting that the two sets of concepts
are on a par: religion belongs alongside other 'superstitious' thought. In showing
both the centrality and the apparent indispensability of these concepts in modern
western thinking, Sartre may be taking issue with an anthropological account of
'pre -rational' mentality, popular at the time, that associated such modes of
thinking with primitive societies. And, following Henri Bergson (1859-1941),
(whose influence on TE extends beyond the occasional passages in which Sartre
disagrees with him), Sartre may be seeking to demonstrate the existence of
'magical' elements in our self-understanding that an unprejudiced
phenomenology must bring to light.

But is this self-understanding necessary, and if not, should we correct it? In
offering a metaphysical diagnosis of the source of unintelligibility — the
ineliminable misfit between causal thinking and the 'absolute' nature of
consciousness — Sartre suggests that we have no alternative to magical, non-
logical concepts. '[M]an is always a sorcerer for man' (p. 35), Sartre writes, and
he remains committed to this claim two years later, when exactly the same
phrase appears in his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (2002:56).
Nonetheless, Sartre's use of terms like 'degeneration', and 'degradation' to
describe the transformation that consciousness undergoes when it becomes an

object of reflection cannot but communicate a sense of regret at this process, and
it is not ultimately clear in TE whether it is merely our intellectual limitations or,
worse, our culpability that prompts this regret. Culpability is at least a possible
interpretation at some points in the text, for example in relation to Sartre's claim
that consciousness 'imprisons itself in the World in order to flee from itself (p.
34).

PHENOMENOLOGY EXISTENTIALIZED

Sartre's conclusion summarizes in three 'remarks' the achievements of his essay.
Within these, he includes his alleged solutions to two long-standing philosophical
problems that have defeated generations of philosophers, Husserl included: the
so-called 'problem of other minds', and the threat of solipsism. Sartre believes
that his account of the Ego's transcendence escapes these problems but, as one
might expect — and as he had already come to see by the time he wrote Being and
Nothingness — the 'solutions' he proposes are short-lived: at most they displace,
but do not eliminate, the traditional problems.

A richer suggestion, advanced in the course of Sartre's first remark, is that his
account of the relationship between consciousness and the I explains, better than
Husserl's can, how the epoche might be motivated. For Sartre, an appeal to
reason here is wholly unconvincing. Why, he asks, should we ever come to
question the 'natural attitude', given that it is not internally incoherent? Sartre's
suggestion, anticipating once again his later account of bad faith, is that the
natural attitude and the Ego that we constitute within it play a practical role: they
'mask from consciousness its own spontaneity' (p. 48). We immerse ourselves in
the natural attitude in order to avoid the anguish that recognition of the
spontaneity of consciousness would induce. (Sartre claims, too, that this
metaphysically-based anguish lies, contrary to psychoanalytical explanation, at
the origin of various psychological disorders.) But this escapist endeavour is not
wholly successful: inevitably moments arise in which we find ourselves
confronted with the reality. The epoche, then, is not driven by reason, but by the
experience of anguish: 'no longer an intellectual method. . .[i]t is an anguish that
imposes itself on us and that we cannot avoid' (p. 49). In Sartre's hands, the
importance of phenomenology is not merely epistemological; its findings affect
the way we live our lives. This existentialist perspective, seen in TE at an early
stage of its development, provides of course Sartre's most distinctive and
creative contribution to phenomenological thinking.

Sartre's final remark considers the political and ethical implications of his
position. Even at this early stage of his career, before the extensive politicization
that the second World War brought about in him, Sartre is concerned to defend
phenomenology against the 'theoreticians of the extreme left' who construe it as
an idealist philosophy. Sartre argues that by situating the self within the world,
his account gives due weight to the 'external resistances' of 'suffering, hunger
and war' (pp. 50-1), and vindicates a materialist outlook. Sartre is not deterred

by the glaring incompatibility at the level of metaphysics between his account of
consciousness and materialism, because, he tells us, 'I have always thought that
such a fertile working hypothesis as historical materialism in no way required as
a basis the absurdity of metaphysical materialism' (p. 51).

Sartre's triumphant claim that, once the transcendence of the Ego is admitted,
'[njothing further is needed' (p. 52) to provide politics and ethics with the right
metaphysical foundation is questionable; his later writings, at any rate, show that
these issues had not been laid to rest. But Sartre's tendency to exaggerate should
not lead us to overlook an indisputable achievement of this elegant text: its
imaginative exploration of the significance and wide-ranging ramifications of a
seemingly theoretical and inconsequential doctrine in Husserl's thought.

References

Husserl, Edmund (1960) Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns, The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff.

(1982) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phcnom-cnological

Philosophy, First Book, trans. F.Kersten, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1984) War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War, November 939-
1940, trans. Q.Hoare, London: Verso.

(2002) Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. Philip Mairet, London: Routledge.

(2003) Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes, London: Routledge.

THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

A sketch for a phenomenological description

For most philosophers, the Ego is an 'inhabitant' of consciousness. Some of them
state that it is formally present at the heart of 'Erlebnisse', as an empty principle
of unification. Others — psychologists, for the most part — claim they can
discover its material presence, as a centre of desires and acts, in every moment of
our psychical life. I should like to show here that the Ego is neither formally nor
materially in consciousness: it is outside, in the world; it is a being in the world,
like the Ego of another.

THE /AND THEME
(A)

The theory of the formal presence of the /

We have to agree with Kant when he says that 'it must be possible for the "I
think" to accompany all my representations'. 1 But should we thereby conclude
that an I inhabits de facto all our states of consciousness and really performs the
supreme synthesis of our experience? It seems that this would be to distort
Kant's philosophy. The problem of critique is a de jure problem: thus Kant
affirms nothing about the de facto existence of the T think'. He seems, on the
contrary, to have clearly seen that there were moments of consciousness without
an I, since he says: 'it must be possible (for the "I think" to accompany, etc.)'.
The real issue is rather that of determining the conditions of possibility of
experience. One of these conditions is that I should always be able to consider
my perception or my thought as mine; that is all. But there is a dangerous
tendency in contemporary philosophy — traces of which may be found in neo-
Kantianism, empirio-criticism, or an intellectualism such as that of Brochard —
which consists of turning the conditions of possibility determined by critique into
a reality? This is a tendency that leads some authors, for instance, to wonder
what 'transcendental consciousness' may actually be. If we formulate the
question in these terms, we are naturally forced to conceive of this consciousness
— which constitutes our empirical consciousness — as an unconscious. But

2 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

Boutroux, in his lectures on Kant's philosophy, 3 had already refuted these
interpretations. Kant never bothered about the way in which empirical
consciousness is de facto constituted, he never deduced it, as in some Neo-platonic
procession, from a higher consciousness, a constitutive hyperconsciousness.
Transcendental consciousness is, for him, merely the set of conditions necessary
for the existence of an empirical consciousness. In consequence, to make the
transcendental / into a real entity, to turn it into the inseparable companion of
each of our 'consciousnesses'," 1 is to make a de facto and not a de jure judgement,
and means that we adopt a point of view that is radically different from Kant's.
And if we then persist in claiming that this move can be authorized by Kant's
considerations on the unity necessary for experience, we commit the same error
as those who turn transcendental consciousness into a pre-empirical
unconscious.

If we thus agree with Kant on the de jure question, the de facto question is not
thereby resolved. So it should here be stated in clear and concise terms: it must
be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all our representations, but does it
accompany them in actual fact? Let us suppose, furthermore, that a certain
representation A passes from a certain state in which the 'I think' does not
accompany it to a state in which the 'I think' does accompany it; will this
representation thereby undergo a modification of structure, or will it remain
basically unchanged? This second question leads us to ask a third: it must be
possible for the 'I think' to accompany all our representations; but are we to
understand by this that the unity of our representations is, directly or indirectly,
made a reality by the 'I think' — or are we to understand that the representations
of a consciousness must be unified and articulated in such a way that an 'I think'
can always be uttered in regard to them? This third question seems to belong to
the de jure domain and, in this domain, to leave behind Kantian orthodoxy. But
what we really have here is a de facto question which can be formulated in these
terms: is the / which we encounter in our consciousness made possible by the
synthetic unity of our representations, or is it the I that in fact unifies the
representations among themselves?

If we abandon all the more or less forced interpretations that post-Kantians
have given of the 'I think', and yet still wish to resolve the problem of the de
facto existence of the / in consciousness, we encounter, en route, the
phenomenology of Husserl. 4 Phenomenology is a scientific, and not a 'critical',
study of consciousness. 5 Its essential way of proceeding is via intuition.
Intuition, according to Husserl, puts us in the presence of the thing. 6 We must
therefore recognize that phenomenology is a de facto science, and that the
problems it raises are de facto problems' 3 — and this is something that can also be
seen from the way that Husserl calls it a descriptive science. 7 The problems of
the relations between the / and consciousness are thus existential problems.
Husserl takes up Kant's transcendental consciousness and grasps it by means of
the epoche. % But this consciousness is no longer a set of logical conditions, but
an absolute fact. It is no longer a de jure hypostasis, an unconscious that floats

THE I AND THE ME 3

between real and ideal realms. It is a real consciousness, accessible to each and
every one of us, once we have performed the 'reduction'. The fact remains that it
is indeed this transcendental consciousness that constitutes our empirical
consciousness, consciousness 'in the world', consciousness with a psychical and
psychophysical me. As far as I am concerned, I am quite happy to believe in the
existence of a constitutive consciousness. I can go along with Husserl in each of
the admirable descriptions 9 in which he shows transcendental consciousness
constituting the world by imprisoning itself in empirical consciousness; I am
convinced, as he is, that our psychical and psychophysical me is a transcendent
object which must come under the scope of the epoche. w But the question I
would like to raise is the following: is this psychical and psycho-physical me not
sufficient? Do we need to add to it a transcendental I, as a structure of absolute
consciousness? 11 The consequences of the answer we give are easy to see. If the
answer is in the negative, then:

1 the transcendental field becomes impersonal, or, if you prefer, 'pre-
personal', it is without an I;

2 the I appears only on the level of humanity and is merely one face of the me,
the active face; 12

3 the 'I think' can accompany our representations because it appears against
the background of a unity that it has not contributed to creating, and it is this
pre-existing unity which, on the contrary, makes it possible;

4 it becomes possible to ask oneself whether personality (even the abstract
personality of an I) is a necessary accompaniment to consciousness, and
whether one cannot conceive of consciousnesses that are absolutely
impersonal. 13

But Husserl has already replied to the question. Having considered that the Me was
a synthetic and transcendental production of consciousness (in the Logische
Untersuchungen), 14 he reverted, in the Ideas, 15 to the classical thesis of a
transcendental I that follows on, so to speak, behind each consciousness, as the
necessary structure of these consciousnesses, whose rays (Ichstrahl) fall on to
each phenomenon that presents itself to the field of attention. Thus transcendental
consciousness becomes rigorously personal. Was this conception necessary? Is it
compatible with the definition that Husserl gives of consciousness?

It is usually believed that the existence of a transcendental I is justified by the
need for consciousness to have unity and individuality. It is because all my
perceptions and all my thoughts are linked to this permanent centre that my
consciousness is unified; it is because I can say my consciousness, and that Peter
and Paul can also speak of their consciousness, that these consciousnesses can be
distinguished from one another. The I is a producer of inwardness. But it is
certainly the case that phenomenology does not need to resort to this unifying
and individualizing I. Rather, consciousness is defined by intentionality. 15
Through intentionality it transcends itself, it unifies itself by going outside

4 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

itself. 17 The unity of the thousand active consciousnesses through which I have
added, now add, and will add in the future, two and two to make four, is the
transcendent object 'two and two make four'. Without the permanence of this
eternal truth, it would be impossible to conceive of a real unity, and there would
be a multiplicity of irreducible operations — just as many as there are
consciousnesses performing the operation. It is possible that those people who
think that '2 and 2 make 4' is the content of my representation may be forced to
resort to a transcendental and subjective principle of unification — in other words,
the I. But it is precisely this of which Husserl has no need. The object is
transcendent to the consciousnesses that grasp it, and it is within the object that
their unity is found. It will be objected that it is necessary for there to be some
principle of unity in duration if the continual stream of consciousnesses is able to
posit transcendent objects outside itself. Consciousnesses must be perpetual
syntheses of past consciousnesses with the present consciousness. And this is
perfectly true. But it is typical of Husserl — who studied this subjective
unification of consciousnesses in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time — that he never resorted to any synthetic power of the /. It is
consciousness that unifies itself, concretely, by an interplay of 'transversal'
consciousnesses that are real, concrete retentions of past consciousnesses. In this
way, consciousness continually refers back to itself: to speak of 'a
consciousness' is to speak of the whole of consciousness, and this singular
property belongs to consciousness itself, whatever its relations with the I may in
other respects be. 18 In the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl seems to have kept
intact this conception of consciousness unifying itself in time. 19 From another
angle, the individuality of consciousness evidently stems from the nature of
consciousness. Consciousness (like Spinoza's substance) 20 cannot be limited
except by itself. It therefore constitutes a synthetic, individual totality,
completely isolated from other totalities of the same kind, and the I can, clearly,
be merely an expression (and not a condition) of this incommunicability and this
inwardness of consciousnesses. We can thus unhesitatingly reply: the
phenomenological conception of consciousness renders the unifying and
individualizing role of the / completely useless. It is, on the contrary,
consciousness that renders the unity and personality of my I possible. The
transcendental I thus has no raison d 'etre.

Indeed, this superfluous I is actually a hindrance. If it existed, it would
violently separate consciousness from itself, it would divide it, slicing through
each consciousness like an opaque blade. The transcendental I is the death of
consciousness. The existence of consciousness, indeed, is an absolute, because
consciousness is conscious of itself; in other words, the type of existence that
consciousness has is that it is consciousness of itself. 21 And it becomes conscious
of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a transcendent object. 22 Everything
in consciousness is thus clear and lucid: the object lies opposite it, in its
characteristic opacity, but consciousness, for its part, is purely and simply the
consciousness of being consciousness of this object: such is the law of its existence.

THE I AND THE ME 5

We need to add that this consciousness of consciousness — with the exception of
cases of reflective consciousness, which I will be examining in detail later — is
not positional, i.e. consciousness is not its own object. 23 Its object is outside
itself by nature, and this is the reason why, in one and the same act,
consciousness can posit and grasp its object. Consciousness as such knows itself
only as absolute inwardness. I will call such a consciousness 'first order' or
'unreflective' consciousness. My question is this: is there any room for an I in a
consciousness of this kind? The reply is clear: of course not. This I, after all, is
neither the object (since it is ex hypothesi inward), nor is it an T of
consciousness, since it is something for consciousness, not a trans lucentz quality
of consciousness, but, to some degree, an inhabitant of it. Indeed, the 7, with its
personality, is — however formal and abstract one may suppose it to be — a centre
of opacity, as it were. It bears to the concrete and psycho-physical me the same
relation as does a point to three dimensions: it is an infinitely contracted me. So
if we introduce this opacity into consciousness, we will thereby destroy the
highly productive definition we gave of it a little earlier: we will freeze and
darken it, so that it is no longer something spontaneous, but bears within itself
the germ of opacity. Yet another result would be that we are constrained to
abandon the original, profound point of view which makes of consciousness a
non-substantial absolute. A pure consciousness is an absolute quite simply
because it is consciousness of itself. It thus remains a 'phenomenon' in the
highly particular sense in which 'to be' and 'to appear' are one and the same. 24 It
is nothing but lightness and translucency. It is in this respect that Husserl's
Cogito is so different from the Cartesian Cogito. But if the I is a necessary
structure of consciousness, this opaque I is thereby elevated to the status of an
absolute. We would then be in the presence of a monad. And this indeed,
unfortunately, is the way Husserl's thought has recently been developing (see the
Cartesian Meditations). 25 Consciousness has become heavier, and lost the
character that made it into the absolute existent by virtue of the fact that it did
not exist. It is now heavy and ponderable. All the results of phenomenology are
in danger of crumbling away if the I is not, every bit as much as the world, a
relative existent, i.e. an object for consciousness. 26

(B)

The Cogito as reflective consciousness

The Kantian T think' is a condition of possibility. The Cogito of Descartes and
Husserl is a de facto statement. The Cogito has been described as having a de facto
necessity, and this expression strikes me as perfectly accurate. Now, it is
undeniable that the Cogito is personal. In the T think', there is an I which thinks.
We here reach the I in its purity and it is indeed from the Cogito that an
'Egology' must begin. And so, the fact that can be taken as the starting point is
this: each time that we grasp our thought, either by an immediate intuition, or by
an intuition based on memory, we grasp an I which is the I of the thought that is

6 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

being grasped and which, furthermore, gives itself as transcending this thought
and all other possible thoughts. If, for instance, I wish to remember a certain
landscape I saw from the train, yesterday, it is possible to bring back the memory
of that landscape as such, but I can also remember that I saw that landscape. This
is what Husserl calls, in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal
Time, the possibility of reflecting in memory. 21 In other words, I can always
perform any kind of act of remembering in the personal mode, and the I
immediately appears. This is the de facto guarantee of the de jure affirmation in
Kant. It thus appears that there is not a single one of my consciousnesses that I
do not grasp as endowed with an I.

But we must remember that all authors who have described the Cogito have
presented it as a reflective operation, i.e. a second-order operation. This Cogito is
performed by a consciousness directed towards consciousness, which takes
consciousness as its object. Let us be clear: the certainty of the Cogito is absolute
since, as Husserl says, 28 there is an indissoluble unity between the reflecting
consciousness and the reflected consciousness (so much so that the reflecting
consciousness cannot exist without reflected consciousness). The fact remains
that we are in the presence of a synthesis of two consciousnesses, one of which is
consciousness of the other. Thus the essential principle of phenomenology, 'all
consciousness is consciousness of something', is maintained. Now, my reflecting
consciousness does not take itself for object when I carry out the Cogito. What it
affirms concerns the reflected consciousness. Insofar as my reflecting
consciousness is consciousness of itself, it is a non-positional consciousness. It
becomes positional only if directed at the reflected consciousness which, in
itself, was not a positional consciousness of itself before it was reflected. Thus the
consciousness that says 'I think' is precisely not the consciousness that thinks.
Or rather, it is not its own thought that it posits by this thetic act. We are thus
justified in raising the question whether the I that thinks is common to the two
superimposed consciousnesses, or whether it is not rather the I of the reflected
consciousness. In fact, all reflecting consciousness is in itself unreflected, and a
new, third-order act is needed to posit it. Moreover, there is no infinite regress
here, since a consciousness has no need of a reflecting consciousness in order to
be conscious of itself. It merely does not posit itself to itself as its own object. 29

But might it not be precisely the reflective act that brings the me into being in
reflected consciousness? This would explain how all thinking grasped by
intuition possesses an I, without running into the difficulties that my preceding
chapter pointed out. Husserl 30 is the first to recognize that an unreflected thought
undergoes a radical modification when it becomes reflected. But does this
modification have to be limited to a loss of 'naivete'? Might not the essential
aspect of the change be the fact that the I appears? Obviously, we need to resort
to concrete experience, and this may seem impossible, since an experience of
this kind is by definition reflective, in other words endowed with an I. But all
unreflected consciousness, being a non-thetic consciousness of itself, leaves
behind it a non-thetic memory that can be consulted. 31 All that is required for

THE I AND THE ME 7

this is to try to reconstitute the complete moment in which this unreflected
consciousness appeared (and this is, by definition, always possible). For
instance, I was just now absorbed in my reading. I am now going to try to remember
the circumstances of my reading, my attitude, the lines I was reading. I am thus
going to bring back to life not merely those external details but a certain
thickness of unreflected consciousness, since it is only by this consciousness that
the objects have been perceived, and they remain relative to it. This
consciousness is not to be posited as an object of my reflection: quite the
opposite, I must direct my attention to the objects I have brought back to life, but
without losing sight of this consciousness; I must maintain a sort of complicity
with it, and draw up an inventory of its content in a non-positional way. The result
is not in doubt: while I was reading, there was a consciousness of the book, of the
heroes of the book, but the I did not inhabit this consciousness, it was merely
consciousness of the object and non-positional consciousness of itself. I can turn
these results, grasped athetically, into the object of a thesis and declare: there
was no I in the unreflected consciousness. This operation should not be
considered artificial, dreamt up for the mere needs of this particular case: it is
evidently thanks to this operation that Titchener 32 was able to state, in his
Textbook of Psychology, that quite often the me was absent from his
consciousness. But he did not take this any further, and did not attempt to
classify the states of consciousness in which there is no me.

The reader will doubtless be tempted to object that this operation, this non-
reflective grasp of a consciousness by another consciousness, can obviously be
performed only in and by memory, and that it thus does not benefit from the
absolute certainty inherent in the reflective act. We would thus find ourselves on
the one hand in the presence of an act that is certain and sure, enabling me to
affirm the presence of the I in reflected consciousness, and on the other hand in
the presence of a dubious memory which would tend to insinuate that the I is
absent from unreflected consciousness. It seems that we have no right to set the
latter up in opposition to the former. But I would ask you to consider that the
memory of unreflected consciousness is not opposed to the data of reflective
consciousness. No one dreams of denying that the I appears in a reflected
consciousness. We simply need to contrast the reflective memory of my reading
('I was reading'), which is in itself rather dubious in nature, with a non-reflected
memory. The rights of present reflection do not, in fact, extend beyond
consciousness grasped in the present moment. And reflective memory, to which
we are obliged to resort in order to restore the consciousnesses that have elapsed,
not only has a dubious character due to its nature as a memory: it also remains
suspect because, on Husserl's own admission, reflection modifies spontaneous
consciousness. And thus, since all the non-reflective memories of unreflected
consciousness show me a consciousness without me, and since on the other hand
theoretical considerations based recognize that the I could not be part of the
internal structure on consciousness 's intuition of essence have obliged us to of
Erlebnisse, we are forced to conclude: there is no I on the unreflected level.

8 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

When I run after a tram, when I look at the time, when I become absorbed in the
contemplation of a portrait, there is no I. There is a consciousness of the tram-
needing-to-be-caught, etc., and a non-positional consciousness of consciousness.
In fact, I am then plunged into the world of objects, it is they which constitute the
unity of my consciousnesses, which present themselves with values, attractive
and repulsive values, but as for me, I have disappeared, I have annihilated
myself. There is no place for me at this level, and this is not the result of some
chance, some momentary failure of attention: it stems from the very structure of
consciousness.

This is something that a description of the Cogito will make even clearer. Can
one say that the reflective act grasps, to the same degree and in the same way, the
/ on the one hand and thinking consciousness on the other? Husserl insists on the
fact that the certainty of the reflective act stems from the way that in it,
consciousness is grasped without facets, without profile, as a totality (without
Abschattungen). 33 So much is evident. On the contrary, the spatio-temporal
object always yields itself via an infinity of aspects and it is basically nothing
other than the ideal unity of this infinity. As for the meanings, the eternal truths,
they affirm their transcendence by giving themselves, from the moment they
appear, as independent of time, whereas the consciousness that grasps them is, on
the contrary, rigorously individualized in duration. My question is this: when a
reflective consciousness grasps the T think', is what it is grasping a full, concrete
consciousness grasped in a real moment of concrete duration? The answer is clear:
the I is not given as a concrete moment, 34 a perishable structure of my present
consciousness; on the contrary, it affirms its permanence beyond that
consciousness and all consciousnesses and — even though, to be sure, it is hardly
similar to a mathematical truth — its type of existence is much closer to that of
eternal truths than to that of consciousness. It is even evident that the reason why
Descartes moved from the Cogito to the idea of thinking substance is that he
believed that I and 'think' are on the same level. We saw just now that Husserl,
albeit more subtly, can basically be charged with making the same error. Of
course, I acknowledge that he grants to the I a special transcendence which is not
that of the object and which could be called a transcendence 'from above'. But
what right does he have to do this? And how are we to explain this privileged
treatment of the I if it is not by metaphysical or critical preoccupations that have
nothing to do with phenomenology? Let us be more radical and affirm quite
fearlessly that all transcendence must fall under the scope of the epoche; 35 this will
perhaps mean we avoid writing such muddled chapters as section 61 of the
Ideas. The I affirms itself as transcendent in the 'I think', and this is because it is
not of the same nature as transcendental consciousness.

We should note, further, that the I does not appear to reflection as the reflected
consciousness: it gives itself through reflected consciousness. To be sure, it is
grasped by intuition and is the object of evidential certainty. But Husserl has
rendered philosophy a signal service by distinguishing between different kinds of
certainty. 36 Well, it is all too certain that the / of the 'I think' is the object of

THE I AND THE ME 9

neither an apodictic nor an adequate evidential certainty. It is not apodictic
because in saying 7, we affirm much more than we know. It is not adequate
because the I presents itself as an opaque reality whose content would need to be
unfolded. Of course, it manifests itself as the source of consciousness but this in
itself ought to make us reflect; indeed, by this very fact it appears as if veiled,
indistinct through consciousness, like a pebble at the bottom of the water — and
by this fact, too, it is immediately deceptive, since we know that nothing except
consciousness can be the source of consciousness. Furthermore, if the I is part of
consciousness, there will then be two I's: the I of reflective consciousness and
the I of reflected consciousness. Fink, 37 Husserl's disciple, even knows of a third
I, the I of transcendental consciousness, liberated by the epoche. Hence the
problem of the three I's, whose difficulties he rather blandly mentions. For us,
this problem is quite simply insoluble, since it is unacceptable for any
communication to be established between the reflective I and the reflected I, if
they are real elements of consciousness; nor, in particular, is it acceptable for
them to achieve a final identity in a single I.

To conclude this analysis, it seems to me that we can make the following
statements:

1 The I is an existent. It has a type of concrete existence, doubtless different
from that of mathematical truths, meanings, or spatio-temporal beings, but
just as real. It gives itself as transcendent.

2 The I yields itself to a special kind of intuition which grasps it behind
reflected consciousness, in a way that is always inadequate.

3 The I only ever appears on the occasion of a reflective act. In this case, the
complex structure of consciousness is as follows: there is an unreflected act
of reflection without I which is aimed at a reflected consciousness. This
reflected consciousness becomes the object of the reflecting consciousness,
without, however, ceasing to affirm its own object (a chair, a mathematical
truth, etc). At the same time a new object appears which is the occasion for
an affirmation of the reflective consciousness and is in consequence neither
on the same level as unreflected consciousness (because the latter is an
absolute that has no need of reflective consciousness in order to exist), nor
on the same level as the object of the unreflected consciousness (chair, etc.).
This transcendent object of the reflective act is the I.

4 The transcendent I must fall under the phenomenological reduction. The
Cogito affirms too much. The sure and certain content of the
pseudo-'cogito' is not 'I am conscious of this chair', but 'there is
consciousness of this chair'. This content is sufficient to constitute an
infinite and absolute field for the investigations of phenomenology.

10 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

(C)

The theory of the material presence of the me

For Kant and for Husserl, the I is a formal structure of consciousness. I have tried
to show that an I is never purely formal, that it is always, even when conceived
in the abstract, an infinite contraction of the material me. But we must, before we
go any further, rid ourselves of a purely psychological theory that affirms, for
psychological reasons, the material presence of the me in all our consciousnesses.
This is the theory of amour-propre put forward by the French moralists. In their
view, the love of self — and consequently the me — is hidden in all feelings, in a
thousand different disguises. In a very general way, the me, by virtue of this love
that it bears to itself, is seen as desiring for itself all the objects that it desires.
The essential structure of each of my acts would then be a reference to myself.
The 'return to me myself would be constitutive of all consciousness.

To object to this thesis that this return to me myself is in no way present to
consciousness — for example when I am thirsty, and see a glass of water that
appears desirable to me — is no real problem for it; it would willingly grant us as
much. La Rochefoucauld is one of the first to have made use of the unconscious
without naming it: for him, amour-propre conceals itself in the most diverse
disguises. We have to track it down before we can grasp it. 38 More generally, it
was subsequently admitted that the me, while it may not be present to
consciousness, is hidden behind it, and is the pole of attraction of all our
representations and of all our desires. The me thus seeks to procure the object for
itself so as to satisfy its desire. In other words, it is desire (or, if you prefer, the
desiring me) which is given as an end and the desired object that is the means.

Now, the interest of this thesis seems to me to reside in the way it brings out
an error very frequently committed by psychologists — an error consisting in
confusing the essential structure of reflective acts with that of unreflected acts. 39
One thereby overlooks the fact that there are always two forms of possible
existence for a consciousness; and, each time that the observed consciousnesses
are given as unreflected, a reflective structure is superimposed on them — a
structure that is thoughtlessly claimed to be unconscious.

I feel pity for Peter and I come to his aid. For my consciousness, one thing
alone exists at that moment: Peter-having-to-be-aided. This quality of 'having-to-
be-aided' is to be found in Peter. It acts on me like a force. Aristotle had already
said as much: it is the desirable that moves the desirer. At this level, desire 40 is
given to consciousness as centrifugal (it transcends itself, it is the thetic
consciousness of 'having-to-be' and the non-thetic consciousness of itself) and
impersonal (there is no me: I am faced with the pain of Peter in the same way I
am faced with the colour of this inkwell. There is an objective world of things
and actions that have been performed or are going to be performed, and actions
come to adhere like qualities to the things that summon them). Now, this first
moment of desire — supposing it has not completely escaped the notice of the
theorists of amour-propre — is not considered by them to be a complete and

THE I AND THE ME 1 1

autonomous moment. They have imagined behind it another state which remains
in the shadows: for example, I aid Peter so as to put an end to the unpleasant
state in which the sight of his sufferings has put me. But this unpleasant state
cannot be known as such and one can attempt to suppress it only after an act of
reflection. A feeling of displeasure on the unreflected level is transcended in the
same way as the unreflected consciousness of pity. It is the intuitive grasp of the
disagreeable quality of an object. And, insofar as it may be accompanied by a
desire, it desires not to suppress itself but to suppress the unpleasant object. 41 It
is thus a waste of time to place behind the unreflected consciousness of pity an
unpleasant state that will then be viewed as the profound cause of the act of pity.
If this consciousness of displeasure does not turn back on itself in order to posit
itself by itself as an unpleasant state, we will remain indefinitely in the
impersonal and unreflected domain. And thus, without even realizing it, the
theorists of amour-propre suppose that the reflected comes first, as something
original and concealed in the unconscious. There is hardly any need to bring out
the absurdity of such a hypothesis. Even if the unconscious exists, 42 who will
ever be persuaded that it conceals within itself spontaneities of a reflected form?
Is it not the definition of the reflected that it is posited by a consciousness? But in
addition, how can we accept that the reflected comes first with relation to the
unreflected? We can doubtless conceive a consciousness appearing immediately
as reflected, in certain cases. But even then, the unreflected has an ontological
priority over the reflected, since it does not need to be reflected in order to exist,
and reflection presupposes the intervention of a second-order consciousness.

We thus reach the following conclusion: unreflected consciousness must be
considered as autonomous. 43 It is a totality that has no need to be completed and
we must recognize without further ado that the quality of unreflected desire is
that it transcends itself by grasping, in the object, the quality of desirability. It is
just as if we lived in a world where objects, apart from their qualities of heat,
odour, shape, etc., had those of repulsive, attractive, charming, useful, etc., etc.,
and as if these qualities were forces that performed certain actions on us. In the
case of reflection, and in this case alone, affectivity is posed for itself, as desire,
fear, etc.; in the case of reflection alone can I think 'I hate Peter', 'I pity Paul',
etc. It is thus, conversely to what has been maintained, on this level that egotistic
life is placed, and on the unreflected level that is placed impersonal life (which
of course does not mean that all reflective life is necessarily egotistic nor all
unreflected life necessarily altruistic). Reflection 'poisons' desire. 44 On the
unreflected level I come to Peter's aid because Peter is 'needing-to-be-aided'. But
if my state is suddenly transformed into a reflected state, then I am watching
myself acting, in the same sense that we say of someone that he is listening to
himself talking. It is no longer Peter who attracts me, it is my helpful
consciousness that appears to me as having to be perpetuated. Even if I merely
think that I must pursue my action because 'it is good', the good qualifies my
behaviour, my pity, etc. La Rochefoucauld's psychology has found its rightful
place. And yet, it is not true: it is not my fault if my reflective life poisons 'in

12 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

essence' my spontaneous life, and in any case reflective life generally
presupposes spontaneous life. Before being 'poisoned', my desires were pure; it
is the point of view I have adopted towards them that has poisoned them. La
Rochefoucauld's psychology is true only for the particular feelings that take their
origin from reflective life, i.e. those that are given first and foremost as my
feelings, instead of first being transcended towards an object.

Thus the purely psychological examination of 'inner-worldly' consciousness
leads us to the same conclusions as our phenomenological study: the I must not
be sought in unreflected states of consciousness nor behind them. The me
appears only with the reflective act, as the noematic correlative 45 of a reflective
intention. We are starting to glimpse how the I and the me are in fact one. We are
going to try and show that this Ego, of which I and me are merely two
faces, constitutes the ideal (noematic) and indirect unity of the infinite series of
our reflected consciousnesses.

The I is the Ego as the unity of its actions. The me is the Ego as the unity of
states and qualities. The distinction drawn between these two aspects of a single
reality strikes me as simply functional, not to say grammatical.

II.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE EGO

The Ego is not directly the unity of reflected consciousnesses. There exists an
immanent unity of these consciousnesses, namely the stream of consciousness
constituting itself as the unity of itself — and a transcendent unity: states and
actions. The Ego is the unity of states and actions — only optionally of qualities. It
is the unity of transcendent unities, and itself transcendent. It is a transcendent
pole of synthetic unity, like the object-pole of the unreflected attitude. But this
pole appears only in the world of reflection. I am going to examine successively
the constitution of states, actions and qualities, and the way the me appears as
the pole of these transcendences. 46

(A)

States as transcendent unities of consciousnesses

The state appears to reflective consciousness. It gives itself to that consciousness
and becomes the object of a concrete intuition. If I hate Peter, my hatred of Peter
is a state that I can grasp by reflection. This state is present to the gaze of
reflective consciousness, it is real. Should we thus conclude that it is immanent,
sure and certain? Of course not. We must not make of reflection a mysterious
and infallible power, or believe that everything that reflection attains is indubitable
because it is attained by reflection. Reflection has de facto and de jure limits. It
is a consciousness that posits a consciousness. Everything that it affirms about
this consciousness is certain and adequate. But if other objects appear to it
through this consciousness, these objects have no reason to participate in the

THE I AND THE ME 13

characteristics of consciousness. Let us consider a reflective experience of
hatred. 47 I see Peter, I feel a kind of profound upheaval of revulsion and anger on
seeing him (I am already on the reflective level); this upheaval is consciousness.
I cannot be in error when I say: I feel at this moment a violent revulsion towards
Peter. But is this experience of revulsion hatred? Obviously not. It is in any case
not given as such. After all, I have hated Peter for a long time and I think I always
will hate him. So an instantaneous consciousness of revulsion cannot be my
hatred. Even if I limit it to what it is, to an instantaneous moment, I will not be
able to continue talking of hatred. I would say: 'I feel revulsion for Peter at this
momenf, and in this way I will not implicate the future. But precisely because of
this refusal to implicate the future, I would cease to hate.

But my hatred appears to me at the same time as my experience of revulsion.
But it appears through this experience. It is given precisely as not being limited
to this experience. It is given, in and by each movement of disgust, revulsion and
anger, but at the same time it is not any of them, it goes beyond each of them as
it affirms its permanence. Hatred affirms that it was already appearing when,
yesterday, I thought of Peter with so much fury, and that it will appear
tomorrow. Furthermore, it draws, by itself, a distinction between being and
seeming, since it is given as continuing to be even when I am absorbed in other
occupations and when no consciousness reveals it. This is enough, it seems to
me, for one to be able to affirm that hatred is not a form of consciousness. It
extends beyond the instantaneous moment of consciousness and it is not subject
to the absolute law of consciousness for which there is no distinction possible
between appearance and being. Hatred is thus a transcendent object. Each
Erlebnis 4S reveals it in its entirety but at the same time is merely a profile of it, a
projection (an Abschattung). Hatred is a letter of credit for an infinity of angry or
revulsed consciousnesses, in the past and the future. It is the transcendent unity of
that infinity of consciousnesses. So, to say 'I hate' or 'I love' on the occasion of
a singular consciousness of attraction or revulsion is to perform a veritable
infinitization, somewhat analogous to the one we carry out when we perceive an
inkwell or the blue of the blotter.

No more is needed for the rights of reflection to be singularly limited: it is
certain that I loathe Peter, but it is and will always remain doubtful whether I
hate him. 49 This affirmation, after all, goes infinitely beyond the power of
reflection. We must not, of course, conclude that hatred is a mere hypothesis, an
empty concept. It truly is a real object, which I grasp through the Erlebnis, but
this object is outside consciousness and the very nature of its existence implies
its 'dubitability'. Thus reflection has a domain of certainty and a domain of
doubt, a sphere of adequate evidence and a sphere of inadequate evidence. Pure
reflection (which is, however, not necessarily phenomenological reflection) stays
with the given without making any claims about the future. This can be seen
when someone, after exclaiming in anger, 'I hate you,' corrects himself and says,
'That's not true, I don't hate you, it was anger that made me say it.' We can here
see two reflections: the one, impure and complicitous, which carries out an

14 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

infinitization of the field, and which suddenly constitutes hatred through the
Erlebnis as its transcendent object, and the other, pure, simply descriptive, which
disarms unreflected consciousness by giving it back its instantaneous character.
These two reflections have apprehended the same, certain data but the one
reflection has affirmed more than it knew and has aimed itself through reflected
consciousness at an object situated outside consciousness.

As soon as we leave the domain of pure or impure consciousness and meditate
on its results, we are tempted to merge the transcendent sense of the Erlebnis
with its immanent character. This merging leads the psychologist to two sorts of
error. The first error lies in this: from the fact that I am often mistaken in my
feelings, or from the fact that, for example, I sometimes think I love where in
fact I hate, I conclude that introspection is deceptive; in this case I definitively
separate my state from the ways in which it appears; I believe that a symbolic
interpretation of all appearances (considered as symbols) is necessary to
determine the nature of the feeling, and I suppose a causal relation between the
feeling and the ways in which it appears: and then we are back with the
unconscious. The second error takes this form: from the fact that (as opposed to
the first case) I know that my introspection is accurate, that I cannot doubt my
consciousness of revulsion while I have it, I believe that I am authorized to
transfer this certainty to the feeling, I conclude that my hatred can be enclosed in
the immanence and the adequacy of an instantaneous consciousness.

Hatred is a state. And by using this term, I have tried to express the character
of passivity that constitutes it. Undoubtedly it will be objected that hatred is a
force, an irresistible impulse, etc. But an electric current or a waterfall are also
forces to be reckoned with; does this in any way lessen the passivity and inertia
of their nature? Do they any the less receive their energy from outside! The
passivity of a spatio-temporal thing is constituted on the basis of its existential
relativity. A relative existence can only be passive, since the least activity would
free it from its relative status and would constitute it as absolute. Likewise hatred,
as an existence relative to the reflective consciousness, is inert. And, of course,
in talking of the inertia of hatred, we do not mean anything other than that it
appears that way to consciousness. Do we not say, after all, 'My hatred was
reawakened...', 'His hatred was countered by the violent desire to...', etc? Are
not the struggles of hatred against morality, censorship, etc., imagined as
conflicts between physical forces, to the extent that Balzac and most novelists
(sometimes even Proust) apply to states the principle of the independence of
forces? The entire psychology of states (and non-phenomenological psychology
in general) is a psychology of the inert.

The state is given as being, to a certain extent, intermediary between the body
(the immediate 'thing') and the Erlebnis. However, it is not given as acting in the
same way on the body as it is on consciousness. On the body, its action is openly
and obviously causal. It is the cause of my mimicry, the cause of my gestures:
'Why were you so unpleasant to Peter?' 'Because I detest him.' But the same
cannot possibly be true (except in theories constructed a priori and with empty

THE I AND THE ME 15

concepts, such as Freudianism) of consciousness. In fact, there is no case in
which reflection can be mistaken about the spontaneity of the reflected
consciousness; it is the domain of reflective certainty. Thus the relation between
hatred and the instantaneous consciousness of disgust is constructed in such a
way as to cope simultaneously with the demands of hatred (the demand to be
first, to be the origin), and the sure and certain data of reflection (spontaneity);
the consciousness of disgust appears to reflection as a spontaneous emanation of
hatred. We encounter here for the first time this notion of emanation, which is so
important whenever inert psychical states have to be linked with the
spontaneities of consciousness. Repulsion appears, as it were, to produce itself a?
the prompting of hatred and at the expense of hatred. Hatred appears through it
as that from which it emanates. We readily acknowledge that the relation of
hatred to the particular Erlebnis of repulsion is not logical. It is, to be sure, a
magical link. 50 But our aim has simply been to describe and nothing more, and,
in addition, we shall soon see that it is in exclusively magical terms that we have
to describe the relations between the me and consciousness.

(B)

The constitution of actions

I shall not be attempting to establish a distinction between active consciousness
and simply spontaneous consciousness. Furthermore, it seems to me that this is
one of the most difficult problems in phenomenology. I would simply like to
point out that concerted action is before all else (and whatever the nature of the
active consciousness may be) a transcendent factor. This is evident for actions such
as 'playing the piano', 'driving a car', or 'writing', because these actions are
'taken' from the world of things. But purely psychical actions, such as doubting,
reasoning, meditating, making a hypothesis, must also be conceived of as
transcendences. What misleads us here is the fact that action is not merely the
noematic unity of a stream of consciousness; it is also a concrete realization. But
it must not be forgotten that action requires time in which to be carried out. It has
individual sections and moments. To these moments there correspond active,
concrete consciousnesses, and the reflection that is aimed at the consciousnesses
apprehends the total action in an intuition which displays it as the transcendent
unity of active consciousnesses. In this sense, it is possible to say that the
spontaneous doubt that fills me when I glimpse an object in the half-light is a
consciousness, but the methodical doubt of Descartes is an action, i.e. a
transcendent object of reflective consciousness. The danger here is evident: when
Descartes says, T doubt therefore I am', is he talking about the spontaneous
doubt that reflective consciousness grasps in its instantaneous character, or is he
talking of nothing other than the enterprise of doubting? This ambiguity, as we
have seen, can be the source of serious errors.

16 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

(C)

Qualities as optional unities of states

The Ego is immediately, as we shall see, the transcendent unity of states and
actions. Nonetheless, there may be an intermediary between the Ego on the one
hand and states and actions on the other, namely, quality. When we have several
times over experienced hatred for different people or deep-rooted rancour or
long-lasting anger, we unify these various manifestations by intending a
psychical disposition to produce them. This psychical disposition (I am full of
rancour, I am capable of violent hatred, I am inclined to anger) is naturally
something more than and different from a simple average. It is a transcendent
object. It represents the substratum of states just as states represent the
substratum of Erlebnisse. But its relation to feelings is not a relation of
emanation. Emanation merely links together consciousnesses to psychical
passivities. The relation of quality to state (or to action) is a relation of
actualization. The quality is given as a potentiality, a virtuality which, under the
influence of various factors, may pass over into actuality. Its actuality is
precisely the state (or the action). The essential difference between quality and
state is evident. The state is the noematic unity of spontaneities, the quality is the
unity of objective passivities. In the absence of any consciousness of hatred,
hatred is given as an existent in act. Conversely, in the absence of any feeling of
rancour, the corresponding quality remains a potentiality. Potentiality is not mere
possibility: 51 it is presented as something that really exists, but whose mode of
existence consists of remaining as a potentiality. To this type naturally belong
failings, virtues, tastes, talents, tendencies, instincts, etc. These unifications are
always possible. The influence of preconceived ideas and social factors is
preponderant here. However, they are never indispensable, since states and
actions can find directly in the Ego the unity that they require.

(D)

The constitution of the Ego as a pole of actions, states, and
qualities

We have just learnt to distinguish between the 'psychical' and consciousness.
The psychical is the transcendent object of the reflective consciousness; 11 ' 52 it is
also the object of the science called psychology. The Ego appears to reflection as
a transcendent object realizing the permanent synthesis of the psychical. The Ego
is on the same side as the psychical. 53 I will note here that the Ego under
consideration is psychical and not psycho-physical. It is not through abstraction
that we separate out these two aspects of the Ego. The psycho-physical me is a
synthetic enrichment of the psychical Ego, which can easily (and without any
kind of reduction) exist in the free state. It is certain, for example, that when
someone says, T am an indecisive person,' it is not the psycho-physical me that
is being directly indicated.

THE I AND THE ME 17

It would be tempting to constitute the Ego as a 'subject-pole', like that 'object-
pole' which Husserl places at the centre of the noematic kernel. This object-pole
is an X, which is the support of determinations:

The predicates are, however, predicates of 'something', and this
'something' also belongs, and obviously inseparably, to the core in
question: it is the central point of unity of which we spoke above. It is the
central point of connection or the 'bearer' of the predicates, but in no way
is it a unity of them In the sense in which any complex, any combination, of
the predicates would be called a unity. It is necessarily to be distinguished
from them, although not to be placed along-side and separated from them;
just as, conversely, they are its predicates: unthinkable without it, yet
distinguishable from it. e

Husserl is hereby intent on underlining the way he considers things as syntheses
that are at least ideally analysable. Doubt-less, this tree, this table are synthetic
complexes and every quality is linked to every other quality. But it is linked to it
insofar as it belongs to the same object X. What is logically prior are the
unilateral relations by which each quality belongs (directly or indirectly) to that
X as a predicate belongs to a subject. Consequently, an analysis is always
possible. This conception is highly debatable. 54 But here is not the place to
examine it. The important thing as far as we are concerned is the fact that an
indissoluble synthetic totality that could support itself would have no need of any
supporting X, on condition, of course, that it is really and concretely
unanalysable. It is useless, for instance, if we consider a melody, to suppose
there is some X which acts as a support for the different notes. 55 The unity stems
in this case from the absolute indissolubility of elements which cannot be
conceived of as separate, except by abstraction. The subject of the predicate will
here be the concrete totality, and the predicate will be a quality abstractly
separated from the totality and gaining its full meaning only when it is linked
back to the totality/

For these very reasons, I refuse to see in the Ego a sort of X pole acting as the
support for psychical phenomena. Such an X would by definition be indifferent
to the psychical qualities of which it would be the support. But the Ego, as we
shall see, is never indifferent to its states, it is 'compromised' by them. Now,
precisely, a support can never be compromised in this way by what it supports
except when it is a concrete totality that supports and contains its own qualities.
The Ego is nothing other than the concrete totality of states and actions that it
supports. Doubtless it is transcendent to all the states that it unifies, but not as an
abstract X whose mission is merely to unify: it is, rather, the infinite totality of
states and actions that never permits itself to be reduced to one action or one
state. If one were looking for an analogy for the unreflected consciousness of
what the Ego is for second-order consciousness, in my view we should think
rather of the World, conceived as the infinite synthetic totality of all things. It

18 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

also happens, indeed, that we grasp the World beyond our immediate
surroundings as a vast concrete existence. In this case, the things surrounding us
appear merely as the extreme point of that world which surpasses them and
envelopes them. The Ego is to psychical objects what the World is to things.
However, the appearance of the World in the background of things is quite rare;
special circumstances are required (well described by Heidegger in Sein und
Zeit) for the world to 'unveil' itself. 56 The Ego, on the contrary, always appears
on the horizon of states. Each state, each action is given as being separable only
by abstraction from the Ego. And if judgement separates the T from its state (as
in the phrase, 'I am in love'), this can only be so as to link them immediately
together; the movement of separation would lead to an empty, false meaning if it
were not given as incomplete and if it were not completed by a movement of
synthesis.

This transcendent totality participates in the dubious character of all
transcendence; in other words, everything that is given us by our intuitions of the
Ego can always be contradicted by later intuitions and is given as such. For
example, I may see clearly that I am prone to anger, jealous, etc., and yet I may
be wrong. In other words, I may be wrong in thinking that I have a me of that
sort. The error is in any case not committed on the level of judgement, but
already on the level of prejudgemental evidential certainty. This dubious
character of my Ego — or even the intuitive error that I commit — does not mean
that I have a real me that I am ignorant of, but only that the Ego intended carries
within itself the character of dubitability (in certain cases, the character of
falseness). One cannot rule out the met aphysical hypothesis that my Ego is not
composed of elements that have existed in reality (ten years or one second ago),
but is merely constituted by false memories. The power of the 'evil genius'
extends this far.

But if it is the nature of the Ego to be a dubious object, it does not follow that
it is hypothetical. Indeed, the Ego is the spontaneous transcendent unification of
our states and our actions. In this capacity, it is not a hypothesis. I do not say to
myself, 'Perhaps I have an Ego', in the way I can say to myself, 'Perhaps I hate
Peter'. I am not here seeking for a unifying meaning to my acts. When I unify
my consciousnesses under the rubric 'hatred', I add to them a certain meaning, I
qualify them. But when I incorporate my states into the concrete totality me, I
add nothing to them. And this is because the relation of the Ego to the qualities,
states and actions is neither a relation of emanation (like the relation of
consciousness to feelings), nor a relation of actualization (like the relation of
quality to state). It is a relation of poetic production (in the sense of poieiri), or, if
you prefer, of creation.

Everyone, by referring to the results of his intuition, can observe that the Ego
is given as producing its states. I am here undertaking a description of this
transcendent Ego as it is revealed to intuition. I will thus start out from this
undeniable fact: each new fact is attached directly (or indirectly, through quality)
to the Ego as to its origin. This mode of creation is indeed a creation ex nihilo, in

THE I AND THE ME 19

this sense that the state is not given as having previously been within the Ego.
Even if hatred is given as the actualization of a certain potentiality for rancour or
hatred, it remains something completely new in comparison with the potentiality
that it actualizes. Thus the unifying act of reflection links each new state in a
very special way to the concrete totality me. It is not limited to grasping it as joining
that totality, as melting into it; it intends a relation that crosses time backwards
and gives the me as the source of the state. The same is of course true for actions
in relation to the I. As for qualities, although they qualify the me, they are not
given as something by which it exists (as is for example the case for an
aggregate: each stone, each brick exists by itself and their aggregate exists by
each one of them). But, conversely, the Ego maintains its qualities by a veritable
continuous creation. However, we do not grasp the Ego as being finally a pure
creative source besides qualities. It does not seem to us as if we could find a
skeletal pole if we removed one by one all the qualities. If the Ego appears as
lying beyond each quality or even beyond all of them, this is because it is opaque
like an object: we would have to undertake an infinite stripping away if we were
to remove all its potentialities. And, at the end of this stripping away, there
would be nothing left, the Ego would have vanished. The Ego is the creator of its
states and sustains its qualities in existence by a sort of conserving spontaneity.
This creative or conserving spontaneity should not be confused with
responsibility, which is a special case of creative production starting from the
Ego. It would be interesting to study the different kinds of procession leading
from the Ego to its states. Most of the time, what is involved is a magical
procession. On other occasions, it may be rational (in the case of a reflected will,
for example). But it always retains a ground of unintelligibility, which I will be
giving an account of shortly. With different consciousnesses (pre-logical,
infantile, schizophrenic, logical, etc.), the nuance of creation varies, but it always
remains a poetic production. A most particular case, of the greatest interest, is
that of the psychosis of influence. What does a patient mean by the words, 'They
are making me have wicked thoughts'? I will try to study this in another work. 57
I will remark here, meanwhile, that the spontaneity of the Ego is not denied: it is
to some extent spellbound, 5 * but it is still there.

But this spontaneity must not be confused with that of consciousness. The Ego,
after all, being an object, is passive. So what we have here is a pseudo-
spontaneity that would find suitable symbols in the gushing forth of a spring, a
geyser, etc. In other words, we are dealing with a mere appearance. Real
spontaneity must be perfectly clear: it is what it produces and cannot be anything
other. Synthetically linked to anything other than itself, it would indeed include a
certain obscurity and even a certain passivity in the transformation. We would be
forced, in fact, to admit that it is turning from itself into something else, which
would in turn presuppose that spontaneity exceeds itself. The spontaneity of the
Ego exceeds itself because the Ego's hatred, although unable to exist by itself
alone, possesses in spite of everything a certain independence vis-a-vis the Ego.
As a result, the Ego is always surpassed by what it produces, even though, from

20 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

another point of view, it is what it produces. Hence those familiar exclamations
of astonishment: 'To think that I could have done that! ', 'To think that I could hate
my father!' etc., etc. Here, obviously, the concrete ensemble of the me, as
intuited hitherto, weighs down on this productive I and holds it back a little from
what that I has just produced. The link between the Ego and its states thus
remains an unintelligible spontaneity. 59 It is this spontaneity that was described
by Bergson in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness, it is this spontaneity that he takes for freedom, without realizing
that he is describing an object and not a consciousness and that the link he is
positing is perfectly irrational because the producer is passive vis-a-vis the thing
created. However irrational it may be, this link is nonetheless the one that we
observe in the intuition of the Ego. And we grasp its meaning: the Ego is an
object apprehended but also constituted by reflective knowledge. It is a virtual
locus of unity, and consciousness constitutes it as going in completely the reverse
direction from that followed by real production; what is really first is
consciousnesses, through which are constituted states, then, through these, the
Ego. But, as the order is reversed by a consciousness that imprisons itself in the
World in order to flee from itself, consciousnesses are given as emanating from
states, and states as produced by the Ego. 60 As a consequence, consciousness
projects its own spontaneity into the object Ego so as to confer on it the creative
power that is absolutely necessary to it. However, this spontaneity, represented
and hypostatized in an object, becomes a bastard, degenerate spontaneity, which
magically preserves its creative potentiality while becoming passive. Hence the
profound irrationality of the notion of Ego. We are acquainted with other
degraded aspects of conscious spontaneity. I will mention just one: an expressive 61
and subtle mimicry can yield to us the Erlebnis of our interlocutor with all its
meaning, all its nuances, all its freshness. But it yields that Erlebnis to us in a
degraded, that is to say, passive form. We are thus surrounded by magical
objects which retain, as it were, a memory of the spontaneity of consciousness,
while still being objects of the world. That is why man is always a sorcerer for man.
Indeed, this poetic link between two passivities, one of which creates the other
spontaneously, is the very basis of sorcery: it is the deep sense of 'participation'.
That is also why we are sorcerers for ourselves, each time that we take our me
into consideration.

By virtue of this passivity, the Ego is capable of being affected. Nothing can
act on consciousness, since it is the cause of itself. But, on the contrary, the Ego
that produces is affected by the repercussions from what it produces. It is
'compromised' 62 by what it produces. The relations are here inverted: the action
or the state turns back on to the Ego in order to qualify it. This brings us back
again to the relationship of participation. Every new state produced by the Ego
colours and nuances the Ego in the moment the Ego produces it. The Ego is to
some extent spellbound by this action, and participates in it. It is not the crime
committed by Raskolnikov that is incorporated into his Ego. Or rather, to be
precise, it is the crime, but in a condensed form, in the shape of a bruise. Thus

THE I AND THE ME 21

everything produced by the Ego acts upon it; we need to add: and only what it
produces. It might be objected that the me can be transformed by external events
(ruin, bereavement, disappointments, change of social environment, etc.). But
this is only insofar as they are for it the occasion of states or actions. It is just as
if the Ego were preserved by its ghostly spontaneity from any direct contact with
the exterior, as if it could communicate with the World only through the
intermediary of states and actions. The reason for this isolation is clear: it is quite
simply because the Ego is an object that appears only to reflection, and which
thereby is radically cut off from the World. It does not live on the same level.

Just as the Ego is an irrational synthesis of activity and passivity, it is also an
irrational synthesis of inwardness and transcendence. It is, in one sense, more
'inward' to consciousness than are states. It is in the most exact sense the
inwardness of reflected consciousness, as contemplated by reflective
consciousness. But it is easy to understand that reflection, in contemplating
inwardness, makes it an object placed before it. But what do we mean by
inwardness? Merely this: that for consciousness, to be and to know oneself are
one and the same thing. This can be expressed in different ways. I can say, for
example, that, for consciousness, appearance is the absolute insofar as it is
appearance, or else that consciousness is a being whose essence implies
existence. 63 These different formulations allow us to conclude that inwardness is
lived (that we 'exist inward "), but that it is not contemplated, since it would itself
lie beyond contemplation, as its precondition. It would be useless to object
that reflection posits reflected consciousness and thereby its inwardness. It is a
special case: reflection and reflected are one and the same, as Husserl very
clearly showed, 64 and the inwardness of the one melts into that of the other. But
to posit inwardness as in front of oneself is perforce to give it the weight of an
object. It is as if inwardness were closed back on itself and exhibited to us
merely its external aspects; as if we had to 'go all round it' in order to understand
it. And it is just in this way that the Ego yields itself to reflection: as an
inwardness closed in on itself. It is inward for itself, not for consciousness. Of
course, we are here dealing yet again with a contradictory composite; indeed, an
absolute inwardness never has any outside. It can be conceived only through
itself and this is why we cannot grasp the consciousnesses of another (for this
reason alone, and not because bodies separate us). In reality, this degraded and
irrational inwardness can be analysed into two highly specific structures:
intimacy and indistinctness. In relation to consciousness, the Ego is given as
intimate. It is just as if the Ego were part of consciousness, with the sole and
essential difference that it is opaque to consciousness. And this opacity is
grasped as lack of distinctness. Lack of distinctness, a notion frequently used in
philosophy, in various forms, is inwardness seen from outside, or, if you prefer,
the degraded projection of inwardness. It is this lack of distinctness that can be
found for example in the well-known 'interpenetrative multiplicity' of Bergson.
It is also this lack of distinctness, prior to the specifications of natura naturata,
that we find in the God of several mystics. Sometimes it can be understood as a

22 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

primordial undifferentiation of all qualities, sometimes as a pure form of being,
prior to all qualification. These two forms of lack of distinctness belong to the
Ego, depending on the way it is considered. In waiting, for example (or when
Marcel Arland explains that an extra-ordinary event is needed to reveal the true
me), 65 the Ego displays itself as a bare potentiality, which will become more
precise and fixed as it comes into contact with events. g66 Conversely, after
action, it seems that the Ego reabsorbs the finished act into an interpenetrative
multiplicity. In both cases, what we have here is a concrete totality, but the
totalitarian synthesis is performed with different intentions. Perhaps one might
go so far as to say that the Ego, in relation to the past, is an interpenetrative
multiplicity and, in relation to the future, a bare potentiality. But we must here
beware of being excessively schematic.

The me, as such, remains unknown to us. And that is easy to understand: it is
given as an object. So the only method for getting to know it is observation,
approximation, waiting, experience. But these procedures, which are perfectly
suitable for the entire domain of the non-intimate transcendent, are not suitable
here, by virtue of the very intimacy of the me. It is too present for one to look at
it from a really external point of view. If we move away from it to gain the
vantage of distance, it accompanies us in this withdrawal. It is infinitely close
and I cannot circle round it. Am I lazy or hardworking? I will find out, no doubt,
if I ask those who know me and if I ask them for their opinion. Or else, I can
collect the facts that concern me and try to interpret them as objectively as if I
were dealing with another person. But it would be futile to ask the me directly
and try to take advantage of its intimacy to get to know it. Quite the contrary: it
is this intimacy that bars our route. Thus, 'to know oneself well' is inevitably to
look at oneself from the point of view of someone else, in other words from a
point of view that is necessarily false. 67 And all those who have tried to know
themselves will agree that this attempt at introspection appears, right from the
start, as an effort to reconstitute, with detached pieces, with isolated fragments,
what is originally given all at once, in a single surge. Thus the intuition of the
Ego is a perpetually deceptive mirage, since, at one and the same time, it yields
everything and it yields nothing. And how, indeed, could it be otherwise, since
the Ego is not the real totality of consciousnesses (this totality would be self-
contradictory, like any infinite totality actualized), but the ideal unity of all states
and actions. Since it is ideal, of course, this unity may embrace an infinity of
states. But it is easy to see that what is yielded to full, concrete intuition is
merely this unity insofar as it incorporates into itself the present state. Starting
from this concrete kernel, a greater or smaller number of empty intentions (a de
jure infinity of them) are directed at the past and the future and aim at states and
actions that are not presently given. Those who have any knowledge of
phenomenology will not find it difficult to understand that the Ego is at one and
the same time an ideal unity of states, the majority of which are absent, and a
concrete totality giving itself entirely to intuition. This means simply that the Ego
is a noematic, and not a noetic, unity. A tree or a chair does not exist in any other

THE I AND THE ME 23

way. Of course, empty intentions can always be fulfilled, and absolutely any
state, or any action, can always reappear to consciousness as being or having
been produced by the Ego.

Finally, what radically prevents one from acquiring any real knowledge of the
Ego is the quite special way in which it is given to reflective consciousness. In
fact, the Ego never appears except when we are not looking at it. The reflective
gaze has to fix itself on the Erlebnis, insofar as it emanates from the state. Then,
behind the state, on the horizon, the Ego appears. So it is never seen except 'out
of the corner of one's eye'. The moment I turn my gaze on it and wish to reach it
without going via the Erlebnis and the state, it vanishes. The reason is this: in
seeking to grasp the Ego for itself and as the direct object of my consciousness, I
fall back on to the unreflected level and the Ego disappears with the reflective
act. Hence this impression of irritating uncertainty, which many philosophers
translate by seeing the I as falling short of the state of consciousness and
asserting that consciousness must turn round on itself in order to glimpse the I
behind it. That is not the real reason: rather, the Ego is by nature elusive.

It is however certain that the I appears on the unreflected level. If I am asked,
'What are you doing?' and I reply, preoccupied as I am, 'I am trying to hang up
this picture', or, T am repairing the rear tyre', these phrases do not transport us
on to the level of reflection, I utter them without ceasing to work, without
ceasing to envisage just the actions, insofar as they have been done or are still to
be done — not insofar as I am doing them. But this T that I am dealing with here
is not, however, a simple syntactic form. It has a meaning; it is quite simply an
empty concept, destined to remain empty. Just as I can think of a chair in the
absence of any chair and by virtue of a mere concept, in the same way I can think
of the I in the absence of the I. This becomes obvious if we consider phrases such
as, 'What are you doing this afternoon?' — 'I'm going to the office'; or, 'I met
my friend Peter'; or, 'I really must write to him', etc., etc. But the I, in falling
from the reflected to the unreflected level, does not merely empty itself. It becomes
degraded: it loses its intimacy. The concept cannot ever be filled by the data of
intuition since it is now aimed at something other than them. The I that we find here
is to some extent that which supports the actions that (I) do or must do in the
world, insofar as they are qualities of the world and not unities of
consciousnesses. For example: the wood must be broken into little pieces for the
fire to catch. It must: it is a quality of the wood and an objective relation between
the wood and the fire that must be lit. Right now I am breaking the wood, i.e. the
action is being realized in the world and the objective and empty support of this
action is the I-concept. That is why the body and the body's images can complete
the total degradation of the concrete I of reflection into an I-concept by acting as
an illusory fulfilment for the latter. 6 8 say that T, am breaking wood, and I see
and sense the object 'wood' in the act of breaking wood. The body thus acts as a
visible and tangible symbol for the I. We can thus see the series of refractions
and degradations that any 'egology' should focus on.

24 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

Reflective consciousness - immanence -
inwardness.

Intuitive Ego - transcendence - intimacy.
(The domain of the psychical.)

Un reflective level

l-concept (optional) - an empty
transcendent - without 'intimacy'.
Body as illusory fulfilment of the l-concept.
(The domain of the psycho-physical)

(E)

The / and consciousness in the Cogito

One might ask why the I appears on the occasion of the Cogito since the Cogito,
if it is performed correctly, is the apprehension of a pure consciousness, without
the constitution of a state or an action. The fact is that the I is not necessary here,
since it is never the direct unity of consciousnesses. One can even suppose a
consciousness performing a pure reflective act which would present itself to
itself as a non-personal spontaneity. However, we have to consider the fact that
the phenomenological reduction is never perfect. A whole host of psychological
motivations plays a part here. When Descartes effects the Cogito, he does so in a
way linked to methodical doubt, and to the ambition of 'making science
advance', etc., which are actions and states. Thus the Cartesian method, doubt,
etc., are given by nature as the enterprises of an I. It is altogether natural that the
Cogito, which appears at the conclusion of these enterprises and which is given
as logically linked to methodical doubt, sees an I appearing on its horizon. This I
is a form of ideal link, a way of affirming that the Cogito is well and truly of the
same form as doubt. In a word, the Cogito is impure, it is a spontaneous
consciousness, no doubt, but one that remains synthetically linked to
consciousnesses of states and actions. The proof of this lies in the fact that the
Cogito is given at one and the same time as the logical result of doubt and also as
what puts an end to that doubt. 69 A reflective grasp of spontaneous
consciousness as a non-personal spontaneity would need to be achieved without
any anterior motivation. It is always possible de jure, but remains quite
improbable or, at least, extremely rare in our human condition. In any case, as I
said above, the I that appears on the horizon of the T think' is not given as a
producer of conscious spontaneity. Consciousness is produced over against it and
moves towards it, comes to meet it. This is all that can be said.

CONCLUSION

I would like, in conclusion, simply to present the three following remarks:

THE I AND THE ME 25

(1)

The conception of the Ego that I am putting forward seems to me to bring about
the liberation of the transcendental field at the same time as its purification.

The transcendental field, purified of all egological structure, recovers its
former limpidity. In one sense, it is a nothing, since all physical, psycho-physical
and psychical objects, all truths, and all values are outside it, since the me has,
for its part, ceased to be part of it. But this nothing is everything because it is the
consciousness of all these objects. There is no longer an 'inner life' in the sense
in which Brunschvicg 70 contrasts 'inner life' and 'spiritual life', since there is no
longer anything that can be described as an object and can at the same time
belong to the intimacy of consciousness. Doubts, remorse, the so-called 'crises
of consciousness', etc., in short all the material of people's diaries become mere
representations. And perhaps one could draw from this a few healthy precepts of
moral discretion. But, in addition, we have to note that, from this point of view,
my feelings and my states, my Ego itself, cease to be my exclusive property. Let
me put it more precisely: up until now, a radical distinction has been drawn
between the objectivity of the spatio-temporal thing or of an eternal truth and the
subjectivity of psychical 'states'. It seemed that the subject enjoyed a privileged
position vis-a-vis its own states. On this view, when two men speak about the
same chair, they are speaking about one and the same thing — this chair which the
one takes and lifts up is the same as the one which the other sees, there is no
mere correspondence of images, there is a single object. But it seemed that when
Paul tried to understand one of Peter's psychical states, he could not reach this
state, an intuitive grasp of which belonged to Peter alone. He could merely
envisage an equivalent, create empty concepts which attempted vainly to reach a
reality that in essence was unavailable to intuition. Psychological understanding
took place through analogy. Phenomenology has taught us that states are objects, 71
that a feeling as such (of love or hatred) is a transcendent object and cannot
contract into the unity of inwardness of a 'consciousness'. In consequence, if
Peter and Paul are both speaking about Peter's love, for instance, it is no longer
true that the one is speaking blindly and by analogy of what the other grasps
fully. They are speaking of the same thing; they doubtless grasp it by different
procedures, but these procedures can be equally intuitive. And Peter's feeling is
no more certain for Peter than for Paul. It belongs, as far as both of them are
concerned, to the category of objects that can be doubted. But this whole
profound and new conception is compromised if the me of Peter, this me that
hates or loves, remains an essential structure of consciousness. Feeling, indeed,
remains attached to it. This feeling 'adheres' to the me. If the me is brought into
consciousness, the feeling is brought along with it. I have come to the conclusion,
on the contrary, that the me is a transcendent object like the state and that,
therefore, it is accessible to two sorts of intuition: an intuitive grasp by the
consciousness whose me it is, an intuitive grasp that is less clear, but no less
intuitive, if grasped by other consciousnesses. In a word, Peter's me is accessible

26 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

to my intuition as it is to Peter's and in both cases it is the object of inadequate
evidence. If this is so, there is nothing 'impenetrable' left in Peter, apart from his
consciousness itself. But this consciousness is radically impenetrable. By this I
mean it is not merely refractory to intuition, but to thought. I cannot conceive
Peter's consciousness without turning it into an object (since I do not conceive it
as being my consciousness). I cannot conceive it, since it would need to be
conceived as pure inwardness and transcendence at one and the same time,
which is impossible. A consciousness can conceive of no other consciousness
than itself. Thus we can distinguish, thanks to our conception of the me, a sphere
accessible to psychology, in which the external method of observation and the
introspective method have the same rights and can aid each other mutually — and
a pure transcendental sphere accessible to phenomenology alone.

This transcendental sphere is a sphere of absolute existence, i.e. a sphere of pure
spontaneities, which are never objects and which determine themselves to exist.
As the me is an object, it is obvious that I will never be able to say: my
consciousness, i.e. the consciousness of my me (except in a purely designating
sense, in the sense in which one says for example 'The day of my baptism'). The
Ego is not the proprietor of consciousness, it is its object. To be sure, we
spontaneously constitute our states and our actions as productions of the Ego. But
our states and actions are also objects. We never have any direct intuition of the
spontaneity of an instantaneous consciousness as produced by the Ego. That would
be impossible. It is only on the level of meanings and psychological hypotheses
that we can conceive of a similar production — and this error is possible only
because on this level the Ego and consciousness are empty. In this sense, if we
understand the 'I think' in such a way as to make thought into a production of the
I, we have already constituted thought as passivity, as estate, i.e. as an object;
we have left the level of pure reflection, in which the Ego doubtless appears, but
on the horizon of spontaneity. The reflective attitude is expressed correctly by
that celebrated phrase by Rimbaud (in the letter of the seer), 'I is an other'. The
context proves that he merely meant that the spontaneity of consciousnesses
cannot emanate from the I, it goes towards the I, it meets it, it allows it to be
glimpsed under its limpid thickness but it is given above all as an individuated
and impersonal spontaneity. The commonly accepted thesis, according to which
our thoughts supposedly spring from an impersonal unconscious and become
'personalized' by becoming conscious, seems to me a coarse and materialistic
interpretation of a correct intuition. It has been supported by psychologists 72 who
had understood very well that consciousness did not 'come out of the I, but who
could not accept the idea of a spontaneity producing itself. These psychologists
thus naively imagined that spontaneous consciousnesses 'came out of the
unconscious where they already existed, without realizing that they had merely
shifted the problem of existence one stage back, a problem that ultimately has to
be formulated and that they had made more obscure, since the prior existence of
spontaneities in pre-conscious limits would necessarily be a passive existence.

THE I AND THE ME 27

I can thus formulate my thesis: transcendental consciousness is an impersonal
spontaneity. It determines itself to exist at every instant, without us being able to
conceive of anything before it. Thus every instant of our conscious lives reveals
to us a creation ex nihilo. Not a new arrangement but a new existence. There is
something that provokes anguish for each of us in thus grasping, as it occurs, this
tireless creation of existence of which we are not the creators. On this level, man
has the impression of eluding himself ceaselessly, overflowing himself,
surprising himself by a richness that is always unexpected, and it is, once again,
the unconscious to which he gives the task of accounting for the way in which
the me is thus surpassed by consciousness. In fact, the me can do nothing to
master this spontaneity, since the will is an object that is constituted for and by
this spontaneity. The will aims at states, feelings, or things, but it never turns
back round on to consciousness. This is easy to see in the few cases where we try
to will a consciousness (I want to go to sleep, I do not want to think about that,
etc.). In these different cases it is essentially necessary that the will be
maintained and preserved by the consciousness that is radically opposed to the
consciousness that it wanted to bring into being (if I want to go to sleep, I remain
awake; if I do not want to think about this or that event, I think of it precisely for
that reason). In my view, this monstrous spontaneity is at the origin of various
types of psychasthenia. Consciousness takes fright at its own spontaneity
because it senses that it lies beyond freedom. 73 This is what can clearly be seen
from an example in Janet. 74 A young bride suffered from a terror that, when her
husband left her alone, she would go over to the window and hail the passers-by
as prostitutes do. Nothing in her upbringing, in her past, or in her character can
serve as an explanation for such a fear. In my view, it is simply that a
circumstance of no importance (reading, conversation, etc.) had caused in her
what might be called a vertigo of possibility. She found herself monstrously free
and this vertiginous liberty appeared to her on the occasion when she was free to
make this gesture that she was afraid of making. But this vertigo can be
understood only if consciousness suddenly appears to itself as infinitely
overflowing in its possibilities the I that ordinarily acts as its unity.

Perhaps, indeed, the essential function of the Ego is not so much theoretical as
practical. I have pointed out, after all, that it does not bind closely together the
unity of phenomena, that it is limited to reflecting an ideal unity, whereas real,
concrete unity has long been achieved. But perhaps its essential role is to mask
from consciousness its own spontaneity. 75 A phenomeno logical description of
spontaneity would indeed show that spontaneity renders impossible any
distinction between action and passion, and any conception of an autonomy of
the will. These notions only have a meaning on the level where all activity is
given as emanating from a passivity that it transcends, in short, on a level where
man considers himself to be simultaneously both subject and object. But it is an
essential necessity that we cannot distinguish between voluntary spontaneity and
involuntary spontaneity.

28 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

It is thus exactly as if consciousness constituted the Ego as a false
representation of itself, as if consciousness hypnotized itself before this Ego
which it has constituted, became absorbed in it, as if it made the Ego its
safeguard and its law: it is, indeed, thanks to the Ego, that a distinction can be
drawn between the possible and the real, between appearance and being, between
what is willed and what is yielded to.

But it may happen that consciousness suddenly produces itself on the pure
reflective level. Not perhaps without an Ego, but overflowing the Ego on all
sides, dominating it and supporting it outside itself by a continuous creation. On
this level, there is no distinction between the possible and the real, because the
appearance is the absolute. There are no more barriers, no more limits, nothing
that can disguise consciousness from itself. Thus consciousness, realizing what
might be called the fate of its spontaneity, 76 suddenly becomes filled with
anguish. It is this absolute and irremediable anguish, this fear of oneself, that in
my view is constitutive of pure consciousness and it is this that is also the key to
the psychasthenic malady I mentioned. If the I of the 'I think' is the primary
structure of consciousness, this anguish is impossible. If, on the contrary, my
point of view is adopted, not only does it give us a coherent explanation for this
malady, but we also possess a permanent reason for effecting the
phenomenological reduction. As you will know, Fink, in his Kant-studien article,
confesses not without melancholy that, so long as one remains in the 'natural'
attitude, there is no reason, no 'motive', for performing the epoche. Indeed, this
natural attitude is perfectly coherent and one can find in it none of those
contradictions which, according to Plato, led the philosopher to carry out a
philosophical conversion. Thus the epoche appears in Husserl's phenomenology
like a miracle. Husserl himself, in the Cartesian Meditations, makes a very
vague allusion to certain psychological motives that might lead one to effect the
reduction. But these motives hardly seem adequate and above all the reduction
does not appear able to operate except after a long period of study; it thus
appears as a skilled operation, which confers a sort of gratuitousness on it.
Conversely, if the 'natural attitude' appears in its entirety as an effort that
consciousness makes to escape from itself by projecting itself into the me and
absorbing itself in it, and if this effort is never completely rewarded, if it merely
needs an act of simple reflection for conscious spontaneity to tear itself
brusquely away from the I and give itself as independent, the epoche is no longer
a miracle, it is no longer an intellectual method, a skilled procedure. It is an
anguish that imposes itself on us and that we cannot avoid, it is at one and the
same time a pure event of transcendental origin and an accident that is always
possible in our daily lives.

(2)

This conception of the Ego is, in my view, the sole possible refutation of
solipsism. 77 The refutation presented by Husserl in Formale und

THE I AND THE ME 29

Transzendentale Logik and in the Cartesian Meditations does not appear to me
capable of affecting a determined and intelligent solipsist. So long as the /
remains a structure of consciousness, it will always remain possible to contrast
the consciousness with its / on the one hand and all other existents on the other.
And finally it is after all me who produces the world. It hardly matters if certain
layers of this world necessitate, by their very nature, a relation to the other. This
relation can be a simple quality of the world that I create and it in no way obliges
me to accept the real existence of other /'s.

But if the I becomes a transcendent, it participates in all the world's
vicissitudes. It is not an absolute, it did not create the universe, it falls like other
existences under the epoche; and solipsism becomes unthinkable as soon as the /
no longer has any privileged position. Instead of being formulated as 'I exist
alone as an absolute', it ought in fact to take the form, 'Absolute consciousness
exists alone as absolute', which is obviously a truism. My I, indeed, is no more
certain for consciousness than the I of other men. It is simply more intimate.

(3)

Theoreticians of the extreme left have sometimes criticized phenomenology for
being an idealism, and drowning reality in the flood of ideas. But if idealism is
the philosophy without evil of M.Brunschvicg, if it is a philosophy in which the
effort of spiritual assimilation 78 never encounters any external resistances, in
which suffering, hunger, and war are diluted into a slow process of unification of
ideas, then nothing can be more unjust than to call phenomenologists 'idealists'.
Indeed, it has been centuries since philosophy has given evidence of such a
realist trend. Phenomenologists have immersed man back in the world, they have
restored to his anguish and his sufferings, and to his rebellions too, their full
weight. Unfortunately, as long as the / remains a structure of absolute
consciousness, phenomenology can always be criticized for being a 'refuge
doctrine', for still removing a certain portion of man from the world, and thereby
turning his attention away from the real problems. In my view, this criticism is
deprived of its justification if we make of the me an existent that is rigorously
contemporary with the world, and whose existence has the same essential
characteristics as the world. I have always thought that such a fertile working
hypothesis as historical materialism in no way required as a basis the absurdity
of metaphysical materialism. 79 It is, in fact, not necessary for the object to
precede the subject for spiritual pseudo-values to vanish and ethics to rediscover
its bases in reality. It is sufficient for the me to be contemporary with the World
and for the subject-object duality, which is purely logical, to disappear
definitively from philosophical preoccupations. The World did not create the me,
the me did not create the World, they are two objects for the absolute,
impersonal consciousness, and it is through that consciousness that they are
linked back together. This absolute consciousness, when it is purified of the I, is
no longer in any way a subject, nor is it a collection of representations; it is quite

30 THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE EGO

simply a precondition and an absolute source of existence. And the relation of
interdependence that it establishes between the me and the World is enough for
the me to appear 'in danger' before the world, for the me (indirectly and via the
intermediary of the states) to draw all its content from the World. Nothing
further is needed to enable us to establish philosophically an absolutely positive
ethics and politics. 80

NOTES

Notes referred to by numerals translate the annotations of Sylvie Le Bon to her
edition of La Transcendance de I'Ego (Paris: Vrin, 1965). Those referred to by
small letters translate Sartre's own original notes. (Trans.)

1 Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Analytic, book 1 , ch. 2, section
2, §16, 'The original synthetic unity of apperception', translated by Norman Kemp
Smith (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 152. See also §§17-18, pp. 155-8.

2 Neo-Kantianism is represented by Lachclicrand Brunscln icg: cmpirio-criticism by
Mach; as for Victor Brochard (1848-1907), he was not just a historian of ancient
philosophy: he was the author of a thesis, De I'erreur (1879) and various articles
on philosophy and ethics, collected at the end of his work Etudes de philosophie
ancienne et de philosophie moderne (Paris: Vrin, 1954).

3 Boutroux, La Philosophie de Kant, a lecture course delivered at the Sorbonne in
1896-97 (Paris: Vrin, 1926).

a I will here be using the term 'consciousness' to translate the German word
Bewusstsein which simultaneously means both the total consciousness, the monad,
and each moment of that consciousness. The expression 'state of consciousness'
strikes me as imprecise because of the passivity it introduces into consciousness.

4 In Imagination (first published in French: Paris, Presses Universitaires de France,
1936), Sartre, in connection with the specific problem of the image, brings out the
general characteristics of the philosophical revolution represented by the
appearance of phenomenology. As here, he insists on the fruitfulness of a method
that aims to be descriptive, even if the 'facts' delivered to him by intuition are
essences.

'Phenomenology is a description of the structure of transcendental consciousness
based on intuition of the essences of these structures' {Imagination: A
Psychological Critique, trans. Forrest Williams (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1962), p. 128).

5 Husserl develops this project in Philosophy as Rigorous Science ( first published in
1911). English translation in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans.
Quentin Lauer (New York, Evanston, IL and London: Harper Torchbooks, Harper
and Row, 1965).

6 'In immediately intuitive acts we intuit an "it itself": Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. I, General

32 NOTES

Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F.Kersten (The Hague, Boston and
London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982) [hereafter called Ideas, I: Trans.], §43, p. 93.

Husserl also says that the thing is given to us 'in flesh and blood', or on other
occasions 'originally', 'in an original form',
b Husserl would say: a science of essences. But for the point of view which we are
adopting, this comes to the same thing.

7 A/de facto science' and a 'science of essences', or else 'eidetic science': these
expressions here come to the same tiling. Indeed, Sartre is not at this point referring
to the contrast — essential though it be — between empirical fact and essence, but to
the more general contrast between de facto and de jure problems. Now, fact and
essence appear together as something given, and the essential thing (here) is
precisely that phenomenology is the science of a given (material or ideal, it barely
matters just yet), as opposed to the Kantian perspective, which raises the pure de
jure question. It is because phenomenology aims at something given, a set of facts,
that it is a descriptive science. Furthermore, if it is true that Husserl wanted to
found a 'science of essences' or an 'eidetic' science, we must above all bear in
mind here that these essences are delivered with certainty, and can be taken in by
the gaze immediately, exactly in the same way as objects would be. From this point
of view, they are (ideal) facts.

'The essence (Eidos) is a new sort of object. Just as the datum of individual or
experiencing intuition is an individual object, so the datum of eidetic intuition is a
pure essence.... Seeing an essence is also precisely intuition, just as an eidetic
object is precisely an object' {Ideos, I, section I, ch. 1, 'Matter of fact and essence',
§3, p. 9)

8 The epoche, the phenomenological reduction, is the bracketing of the natural
attitude, always imbued as it is with a spontaneous realism. Sartre thus, following
Husserl, also designates this natural consciousness by the expression 'ultramundane
consciousness'. On reduction and reductions, see Ideas, I, section 2, ch. 4, §§56 to
62, pp. 131-43; and the Cartesian Meditations, §8 {Cartesian Meditations: An
Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1960), pp. 18-21.

9 Those of Ideas, I, mainly.

10 'Consequently for me, the meditating Ego who, standing and remaining in the
attitude of epoche, posits exclusively himself as the accept-ance-basis of all
Objective experiences and bases, there is no psychological Ego and there are no
psychical phenomena in the sense proper to psychology, i.e., as components of
psychophysical men' {Cartesian Meditations, §1 1, pp. 25-6).

1 1 The problem is already raised by Husserl in § 1 1 of the Cartesian Meditations
already quoted, entitled 'The psychological and the transcendental Ego'. Indeed, in
the passage quoted in note 10, Husserl immediately adds, 'By phenomenological
epoche 1 reduce my natural human Ego and my psychical life — the realm of my

/ ' nee to m\ li isccndcnlal heno nological Ego, the

realm of transcendeiital-plieiioiiienological self-experience'. And of this
transcendental Ego he claims that one can never reduce it.

12 Sartre designates by the concept / the personality in its active aspect; by me he
means the concrete psycho-physical totality of the same personality. It is clearly
understood that the / and the me are united, and constitute the Ego, of which they
are merely the two faces.

NOTES 33

The status of the Ego, which is here still unsettled, becomes firmer in Being and
Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E.Barnes
(London: Methuen, 1958), pp. 162-5.

13 The consequences listed constitute the basis of the thesis that Sartre will defend, in
opposition to the last works of Husserl.

14 Logical Investigations, vol. II, trans. J.N.Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), V, §8,
'The pure Ego and awareness ('Bewusstheit'). Husserl's evolution can be sensed at
work within the Logical Investigations themselves. Indeed, Husserl writes, 'I must
frankly confess, however, that I am quite unable to find this ego, this primitive,
necessary centre of relations' (p. 92). To which he (unfortunately) added in the
second (1913) edition, the following note: 'I have since managed to find it, i.e.
have learnt not to be led astray from a pure grasp of the given through corrupt
forms of ego-metaphysic' (p. 353 n. 8).

15 Cf Ideas, I, §80, for the image of the ray (p. 191). and especial!) § 57: The
question of the exclusion of the pure Ego' (p. 132). See the fourth Cartesian
Meditation, relative to the problems constitutive of the transcendental Ego.

16 For Sartre, the hypothesis of a transcendental / as a personal locus that founds and
unifies every consciousness is superfluous. For him, there is merely a pre-personal
or impersonal transcendental field.

Transcendent and transcendental are not taken by him in the Kantian sense, but
rather in the Husserlian sense, as it is defined for example in §11 of the Cartesian
Meditations. The transcendental field is the field that is constituted by the
originating consciousnesses that bestow meaning. It needs to be pointed out that
Sartre was to abandon this term (as too Kantian?), which practically disappeared in
Being and Nothingness. There, consciousness is considered in different ways
depending on whether it is unreflective or reflective. There is no longer any Ego or
even any transcendental field. Conversely, the transcendence of the Ego remains a
fundamental idea. The notions of transcendence and originality, indeed, are
correlative. 'Transcendence is the constitutive structure of consciousness' (Being
and Nothingness, p. xxxvii), i.e. consciousness is from the start torn away from
itself to move out towards objects. This is the meaning of the well-known phrase,
'All consciousness is consciousness of something.' Cor-relatively, the things which
are called transcendent to consciousness are the world and its objects (physical,
cultural, etc.), insofar as they are, by definition, outside consciousness, and the
absolute Other for consciousness.

17 On intentionality, see Ideas, I, section 3, ch. 2, §84: 'Intentionality as principal
theme of phenomenology'; and also Sartre's article, 'Une idee fondamentale de la
"phcnomcnologie" de Husserl: l'intention-nalite', Nouvelle Revue francaise, 52, no.
304, pp. 29-32; translated by Joseph Fell as 'Intentionality: A fundamental idea in
Husserl's phenomenology'. Journal of the lihtish Society for I'lieno/iienology, 1.
no. 2, pp. 4-5.

18 On the self-constituting of phenomenological time, see the lectures On the
Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), §39, p. 84,
entitled 'The double intentionality of retention and the constitution of the flow of
consciousness', where Husserl explains that 'the flow of consciousness constitutes

19 See the fourth Cartesian Meditation, §37: 'Time as the universal form of all
egological genesis' (p. 75).

34 NOTES

20 'By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through Itself, that is,
that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it
must be formed' (Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley, Part I, definition 3
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 1). Sartre says: 'consciousness is
consciousness through and through. It can be limited only by itself {Being and
Nothingness, p. xxxi).

21 'But precisely because the question concerns an absolute of existence and not of
knowledge, it is not subject to that famous objection according to which a known
absolute is no longer an absolute because it becomes relative to the knowledge
which one has of it. In fact the absolute here is not the result of a logical
construction on the ground of knowledge but the subject of the most concrete of
experiences. And it is not at all relative to this experience because it is this
experience. Likewise it is a non-substantial absolute' {Being and Nothingness, p.

22 'Transcendence is the constitutive structure of consciousness; that is...
consciousness is born supported by a being which is not itself. . . . Consciousness
implies in its being a non-conscious and transphenomenal being.... Consciousness
is a being such that in its being, its being is in question insofar as this being implies
a being oilier than itself (Being and Nothingness, p. xxxviii).

23 'Every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional
consciousness of itself {Being and Nothingness, p. xxix).

24 'In the psychical sphere there is, in other words, no distinction between appearance
and being.... Appearances themselves... do not constitute a being which itself
appears by means of appearances lying behind it' {Philosophy as Rigorous Science,
p. 106).

'Modern thought has realized considerable progress by reducing the existent to
the series o ('appearances w Inch manifest it.. .. The being of an existent is exactly w hat
it appears. Thus we arrive at the idea of the phenomenon such as we can find, for
example in the "phenomenology" of Husserl or of Heidegger — the phenomenon
can be studied and described as such, for it is absolutely indicative of itself {Being
and Nothingness, p. xxii).

25 This trend is indicated by the fourth Cartesian Meditation, which discusses 'The
full concretion of the Ego as monad' (p. 67), and the fifth Meditation, entitled
'Uncovering of the sphere of transcendental being as monadological
intersubjectivity' (p. 89).

26 The difficulties entailed by the Husserlian conception of transcendental
consciousness as an 'arche-region' have recently been recalled in an article by
Jacques Derrida published in the Etudes philosophiques (1963):
'Phanomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1925, by Ed.
Husserl'. In particular. Derrida writes: 'My transcendental / is radically different,
as Husserl makes clear, from my natural, human /; and yet nothing distinguishes
the two. The (transcendental) / is not an other. Above all, it is not the metaphysical
or formal ghost of the empirical me. This would lead to a criticism of the
theoretical image, and the metaphor of the / as an absolute spectator of its own
psychical me, all that analogical language which we sometimes have to use to
indicate the transcendental reduction and to describe that strange "object", the
psychical me standing over against the absolute transcendental Ego.'

NOTES 35

27 For example, in Appendix XII: 'Internal consciousness and the grasping of
experiences' (pp. 130-3).

28 With the 'I am', I grasp an apodictic certainty, as Husserl also puts it in the
C 'artesian Meditations.

29 To summarize, a phenomenological analysis of consciousness will distinguish
between three degrees of consciousness:

1 a first degree on the level of the unrefleeted consciousness, non-
self-positing, since it is self-consciousness as consciousness of
a transcendent object.

With the Cogito:

2 a second degree: the reflecting consciousness is non-self-
positing, but it does posit the reflected consciousness.

3 a third degree, which is a sccond-dcgrcc Ihctic acl. by which
the reflecting consciousness becomes self-positing.

In other words, on the level of the second degree, there are unrefleeted acts
of reflection.

As for the autonomy of the unrefleeted consciousness, it is strongly affirmed in
the Introduction to Being and Nothingness.

30 In the introduction to Ideas, I, Husserl declares that phenomenology demands 'a
new style of attitude... which is entirely altered in contrast to the natural attitude in
experiencing and the natural attitude in thinking' (p. xix); and, in §31, entitled
'Radical alteration of the natural positing' (p. 57), he makes this affirmation more

31 Husserl appeals to non-thetic memories of non-thetic consciousnesses in On the
Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time.

32 E.B.Titchener (1867-1927) was an Anglo-American psychologist. A pupil of
Wundt, he devoted himself to experimental psychology, and had an especial
influence on Anglo-Saxon psychology. Among his works are: An Outline of
Psychology (1896); Text-Book of Psychology (quoted here) (1910); Experimented
Psychology (1927).

33 Sartre is here referring to the phenomenological theory of perception by 'profiles'
or 'sketches', in German, Abschattungen [usually translated as 'adumbrations':
Trans.]. See Ideas, I, §41: 'Of essential necessity there belongs to any "all-sided",
continuously, unilarily, and self-confirming experimental consciousness of the
same physical thing a multifarious system of continuous multiplicities of
appearances and adumbrations in which all objective moments falling within
perception with the characteristic of being themselves given "in person" are
adumbrated by determined continuities' (p. 87).

Sartre contrasts though! and perception, for example, in The Imaginary: A
Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (trans. Jonathan Webber
(London and New York: Routledge, 2003), Part one, eh. 1, section 3): 'They are
radically distinct phenomena: one is knowledge conscious of itself, which places
itself at once in the centre of the object; the other is a synthetic unity of a
multiplicity of appearances, which slowly serves its apprenticeship.'

36 NOTES

34 Husserl seems to have had a presentiment of this, but he does not dwell on this
intuition. However, in §54 of Ideas, I, he had written: 'Certainly a consciousness
without an animated organism and, paradoxical as it sounds, also without a psyche,
a consciousness which is not personal, is imaginable. That is to say, a stream of
consciousness in which the intentional unities of experience, organism, psyche, and
empirical Ego-subject did not become constituted, in which all of these experiential
concepts, and therefore the concept of a mental process in the psychological sense
(as a mental process of a person, an animate Ego), were without any basis and, in
any case, without any validity' (pp. 127-8).

35 Husserl was never to recognize this.

'Among the universal essential peculiarities pertaining to the transcendentally
purified realm of mental processes the first place is due the relationship of each
mental process to the "pure" Ego. Laeh "cogito". each act in a distinctive sense, is
characterized as an act of the Ego, it "proceeds from out of the Ego", it "lives"
"actionally" in the act. ... No excluding can annul the form of cogito and cancel out
the "pure" subject of the act: the "being directed to", the "being busied with", the
"taking a position toward", the "undergoing", the "suffering from", necessarily
includes in its essence this: that it is precisely a ray "emanating from the Ego" or, in
a reverse direction of the ray, "toward the Ego" — and this Ego is the pure Ego; no
reduction can do anything to it', Ideas, I, §8o, The relationship of mental processes
to the pure Ego' (pp. 190-1).

Likewise, cf. the first Cartesian Meditation, §8, p. 21: after the reduction, 1 again
find myself as 'the pure ego, with the pure stream of my cogitationes'.

36 The different sorts of certainty are defined in Ideas, I, §3, then in the first Cartesian
Meditation, §6.

37 Litgen Fink, Die pluiiioincnologisolic Philosophic L.llusscrls in dor gegenwartigen
Kritik(Kantstudien, 1933).

38 'Self-love is love of oneself and of all things in terms of oneself; it makes men
worshippers of themselves and would make them tyrants over others if fortune
gave them the means. It never pauses for rest outside the self, and, like bees on
flowers, only settles on outside matters in order to draw from them what suits its
own requirements. Nothing is so vehement as its desires, nothing so concealed as
its aims, nothing so devious as its methods; its sinuosities beggar the imagination,
its transformations surpass metamorphoses, its complications go beyond those of
chemistry. No man can plumb the depths or pierce the darkness of its chasms' (La
Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1693 supplement, trans. Leonard Tancock, §563
(Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1959), p. 112).

39 On the double form of existence always possible for a consciousness, and
guaranteeing the autonomy of the pre-reflective, see Being and Nothingness,
Introduction.

40 The phenomenological description of desire is developed in Being and
Nothingness, pp. 382-98.

41 Likewise, emotion is an unreflected kind of behaviour, not unconscious, but
conscious of itself non-thetically, and its manner of being non-thetically self-
conscious lies in the way it transcends itself and gains purchase on the world
through its grasp of, as it were, the quality of things. Emotion is 'a transformation
of the world', says the Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. Philip Mairet
(London: Methuen, 1962), p. 63.

NOTES 37

42 On the problem posed by the Freudian unconscious, see, in Being and Nothingness,
the chapter 'Bad faith' (pp. 47-70); and Part 4, ch. 2, section 1: 'Existential
psychoanalysis' (pp. 557-75). See note 74 below.

43 Sartre always insisted on this autonomy of the unreflected consciousness, which
finds its basis in the essential intentionality of consciousnesses. This conception of
the ontological priority of the unreflected over the reflected remains central in his
later works, in particular Imagination (the image is an ante-predicative certainty),
the Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, The Imaginary, and Being and
Nothingness, because it constitutes the only radical means of eliminating all
idealism.

44 It is in the same way that the rake, replacing the desirable-object with his desire
itself as being desirable, thereby immediately poisons that very desire. In any case,
he forces it to undergo a fundamental alteration vis-a-vis naive desire. Cf. Being
and Nothingness, p. 385.

45 The terms 'noema' (noematic) and 'noesis' come from Husserl's phenomenology.
Sec Ideas, I, section 3, ch. 3. Sartre gives a deliberately simplified definition of it in
Imagination, ch. 4, p. 139: 'For haviny put the world "between parentheses", the
phenomenologist does not lose it. The distinction "consciousness world" loses its
meaning, and the line is now drawn differently. The set of real elements of the
conscious synthesis (the hylc and the various intentional acts which animate them)
are distinguished from the "meaning" or "sense" which inhabits the consciousness.
The concrete psychic reality is to be called noesis, and the indwelling meaning,
noema. For example, "perceived-blossoming-tree" is the noema of the perception I
now have of it. This "noematic meaning" which belongs to every real
consciousness, however, is itself nothing real' (p. 139).

c Cf. Zeitbewusstsein, passim [i.e. Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the
Consciousness of Inner Time: Trans.].

46 The problem of the Ego's relation to states, actions and qualities, which this second
part thematizes, is briefly taken up in Being and Nothingness in the chapter
'Temporality', pp. 162-5.

47 Cf. hatred as a possibility of my relation to others, Being and Nothingness, pp. 410-
12.

48 Erlebnis: lived experience, intentional lived experience.

For the meaning of this term, Sartre, in a note in Imagination (p. 160, n. 14), refers
to Ideas, I, §36, and adds: "The term Erlebnis, untranslatable into French, comes
from the verb erleben. Etwas erleben means "to live something". Erlebnis has
approximately the meaning of vecu [lived through] as used in Bergsonian
philosophy.'

49 'The certain' and 'The probable' constitute the first two of four sections of the
study on The Imaginary. Only my 'consciousnesses-of are certain in their
spontaneous leaping forth towards things; the paradox of these first-degree
consciousnesses is that they are simultaneously grasped as pure interiorities and as
breaking out towards the things that are outside. Apart from these consciousnesses,
every object, as an object for consciousness, whether it be my hatred or this table,
will also remain dubious, since no intuition will ever be able to deliver it to me
once and for all in its totality.

50 Sartre here acknowledges for the first time the appearance of magical processes in
consciousness. He would go on to study (in the Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions

38 NOTES

of 1939) the strange magical behaviour constituted by emotion, the unreflected
flight of a consciousness in the face of a world which violently invades it and
which it would like to annihilate.

51 On the possible, cf. Being and Nothingness: 'The for-itself and the being of
possibilities', p. 95. On potentiality, see Being and Nothingness, pp. 195-7.

d But it may also be aimed at and reached via the perception of types of behaviour. I
hope to explain elsewhere [n. 52] my thinking on the fundamental identity of all
psychological methods.

52 Sartre was here referring to his treatise on phenomenological psychology, entitled
La Psyche, written in 1937-8. Having discovered the notion of 'psychical object',
as sketched out in the study on the Ego, he developed it by applying it to various
states or feelings. But this psychology did not satisfy him, in particular because he
was still lacking the idea of 'nihilation', which was to be discovered in Being and
Nothingness. La Psyche was thus abandoned. Only one extract was published in
1939: the Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions.

On this point, see the information given in Simone de Beauvoir's The Prime of
Life, trans. Peter Green (London: Andre Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1962), pp. 253-6.

53 Being and Nothingness explicitly takes off from the conclusions of this essay. In
the chapter entitled 'The self and the circuit of selfness', the Ego definitively
moves over to the domain of the in-itself, which becomes the raison d'etre of its
transcendence, as the latter is established here. 'In an article in Recherches
philosophiques, I attempted to show that the Ego does not belong to the domain of
the for-itself. I shall not repeat this here. Let us note only the reason for the
transcendence of the Ego: as a unifying pole of Erlebnisse the Ego is in-itself, not
for-itself. If it were of the nature of consciousness, in fact, it would be to itself its
own foundation in the translucency of the immediate. But then we would have to
say that it is what it is not and that it is not what it is, and this is by no means the
mode of being of the "I". In fact the consciousness which I have of the "I" never
exhausts it, and consciousness is not what causes it to come into existence; the "I"
is always given as having been there before consciousness — and at the same time
as possessing depths which have to be revealed gradually. Thus the Ego appears to
consciousness as a transcendent in-itself, as an existent in the human world, not as
of the nature of consciousness' {Being and Nothingness, p. 103).

e Ideas, I, §131, pp. 313-16.

54 Because it is by no means certain that in the perception of a thing, each
consciousness (of the qualities of that thing) is immediately related to anything
other than itself. In fact, it is absolutely not the case, since precisely there is an
autonomy of the unreflected consciousness.

55 Husserl takes the example of a melody in his On the Phenomenology of the
Consciousness of Internal Time, §14, pp. 37-8.

f Husserl in any case is perfectly well aware of this kind of synthetic totality, to
which he devoted a remarkable study: Logical Investigations, II, Investigation III,
pp. 435-89.

56 For the world to appear in the background of things, our habitual categories of
apprehension of the world have to be broken down. In fact, their grasp gives us
access only to the spatio-temporal world of science. But it happens that suddenly
another world arises, as a naked presence, behind the broken instruments.

NOTES 39

57 This is another reference to La Psyche. Cf. The Imaginary, Part 4, section 3 ('The
pathology of the imagination'). See also note 52, above.

58 Thus desire is described by Sartre in Being and Nothingness as 'an attitude aiming
at enchantment' (p. 394).

59 'The ambiguity is brought to light in Bergson's theory of the consciousness which
endures and which is a "multiplicity of interpenetration". What Bergson is touching
on here is the psychic state, not consciousness conceived as for-itself (Being and
Nothingness, p. 166).

60 This is why the Ego plays a great role in the self-imprisonment of consciousness,
i.e. in the types of behaviour associated with bad faith. Cf. Being and Nothingness,
Part l,ch. 2, pp. 47-70.

61 Sartre would later analyse, in The Imaginary, the implications of the activities of
consciousness which proceeds to rcil'y meaning. Expressive mimicry, for instance,
can include within itself a relationship of possession, in the magical sense, between
the meaning to be conveyed and the matter in which it takes form (face, flesh, body):
'an imitator is one possessed' (Part one, ch. 2, section 3).

62 Thus 'the desire compromises me; I am the accomplice of my desire' (Being and
Nothingness, p. 388).

63 Cf. the introductory section, 'The pursuit of being', in Being and Nothingness, pp.

64 In the 'unity of a single concrete cogitatio', according to Ideas, I, §38, p. 79.

65 In an article in the Nouvelle Revue francaise, perhaps 'Sur un nouveau mal du
siecle', published in 1924, reprinted in Essais critiques (Paris: Gallimard. 1931), p.
14; it is a frequent theme for Marcel Arland; see in the same collection his essay on
Oscar Wilde, p. 118.

g As in the case where the passionate man [n. 66], attempting to convey the fact that
he does not know how far his passion will take him, says, T am afraid of myself."

66 Cf. the analysis of the passionate man by Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of
Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1967), pp. 62-7;

in. I B( in > .in,, \ >tliin ;in s Part 1, ch. 2: 'Patterns of bad faith', p. 55.

67 Because 'it is as an object that I appear to the Other', as is shown in Being and
Nothingness, p. 222.

68 Cf. Being and Nothingness, Part 3, ch. 2, 'The body', pp. 306-39. 'My body's
depth of being is for me this perpetual "outside" of my most intimate "inside"' (p.
353).

69 On the enterprise of Descartes, see the article in Sartre's Situations I (Paris:
Gallimard, 1947), entitled 'La liberie cartesienne', pp. 314-35.

70 Leon Brunschvicg, 'Vie interieure et vie spirituelle', a paper delivered at the
Naples International Philosophy Congress (May 1924), published in the Revue de
metapliysique et de morale (April-June 1925), then republished in Ecrits
philosophiques, vol. II (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954).

71 All Erlebnis is accessible to reflection: this affirmation explains the renewal of
psychology due to the phenomenological descriptive method. It indeed founds the
reflective studies of the unreflected: studies of emotion, or the imaginary, or even
ti 'i if Bein , , \ ungi s these laller are. in fact, nothing other than the
implementation of the conclusions of The Traiiseeiideni e of the Ego. The same was
true of the unpublished study on La Psyche.

72 Sartre is here alluding to the Freudians.

40 NOTES

73 It seems that, at the time Sartre was writing the Transcendence (1934), he was still
not giving to the concept of liberty the importance and range that it would have in
Being and Nothingness. How otherwise are we to understand a sentence such as,
'Consciousness takes fright at its own spontaneity because it senses that it lies
beyond freedom'? Freedom, here, is understood on analogy with responsibility and
will, which have been alluded to, i.e. it is restricted to the transcendent sphere of
ethics. Consequently, Sartre can see in freedom, as his words in The Transcendence
of the Ego put it, a 'special case' within the transcendental field constituted by
immediate spontaneities. Freedom is to spontaneity what the Ego and psychical life
in general are to the impersonal transcendental consciousness.

In Being and Nothingness, freedom and spontaneity have come together.
Freedom has become coextensive with the whole consciousness. Of course,
freedom is also an ethical concept — it is even the fundamental concept of ethics —
insofar as my act is an expression of it. But the free act is based on a more
primitive freedom, which is none other than the very structure of consciousness in
its pure translucency. More than being a concept, freedom is 'the stuff of my
being', it pervades me through and through.

Cf. Being and Nothingness, Part 4, ch. 1: 'Being and doing: Freedom', pp. 433-
556.

74 This example is taken from Pierre Janet's work entitled Les Nevroses.

What Sartre has to say about it, and what he says about the unconscious in
general in The Transcendence of the Ego, enables one to measure the distance that
now separates him from his 1934 positions, as far as psychoanalysis is concerned.
The importance of this change needs to be emphasized. The shift was already
evident when Sartre published his study Baudelaire in 1947 (English translation by
Martin Turnell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949)); today [1965: Trans.] he has
totally reconsidered the problems raised by neuroses and psychoses, and would
certainly not explain them in such a simplistic fashion as he did in 1934. In
particular, he views as puerile his former interpretation of the neurotic attitude of
the 'young bride' treated by Janet; he would no longer say that 'nothing in her
upbringing, in her past, or in her character con serve as an explanation": he \\ ould here
abandon the notion of explanation for that of dialectical understanding, which
must necessarily start out from that nasi, that upbringing, thai character.

Simone de Beauvoir in The Prime of Life gives an account of the reasons for
which Sartre had previously rejected psychoanalysis; see pp. 22-3 and 106.

75 Hence the onto logical possibility of behaving in bad faith.

76 Cf. Being and Nothingness, Part 4, ch. 1, section 3: 'Freedom and responsibility':
'Man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his
shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being' (p.
553).

77 Cf. Being and Nothingness, Part 3, ch. 1: 'The reef of solipsism' (p. 223ff), in
particular section 3: "Husscrl. Hegel. Heidegger" (p. 233). where Sartre summarizes
and criticizes the attempts to refute solipsism set out by Husserl in Formal and
Transcendental Logic and Cartesian Meditations. Sartre acknowledges that the
solution proposed in The Transcendence of the Ego is inadequate: 'Formerly I
believed that I could escape solipsism by refuting Husserl's concept of the
existence of the Transcendental "Ego". At that time I thought that since I had
emptied my consciousness of its subject, nothing remained there which was

NOTES 41

privileged as compared to the Other. But actually although I am still persuaded that
the hypothesis of a transcendental subject is useless and disastrous, abandoning it
does not help one bit to solve the question of the existence of Others. Even if
outside the empirical Lgo there is nothing other than the consciousness of that Lgo
— that is, a transcendental field without a subject — the fact remains that my
affirmation of the Other demands and requires the existence beyond the world of a
similar transcendental field. Consequently the only way to escape solipsism would
be here again to prove that my transcendental consciousness is in its very being
affected by the extramundane existence of other consciousnesses of the same type.
Because Husserl has reduced being to a series of meanings, the only connection
which he has been able to establish between my being and that of the Other is a
connection of knowledge. Therefore Husserl could not escape solipsism any more
than Kant could' (p. 235).

To get rid of solipsism once and for all, it is necessary to resort to Hegel's
intuition that consists of making 'me depend on the Other in my being" (p. 237),
and to radicalize that intuition. Sartre gives his conclusions on pp. 250-2.

78 This is the 'alimentary philosophy' criticized in the article on intentional ity in the
Nouvelle Rt\n, ■ mcaisi (sec note 17, above).

79 Sartre subjects this absurd materialism to criticism in 'Materialisme et revolution',
Situations, III, pp. 135-228.

80 Various articles in Situations (I to VI), the Entretiens sur la politique, and
especially the Critique of Dialectical Reason all bear witness to the continuity, in
Sartre, of the ethical and political preoccupations that are here phenomenologically
founded. Situations Vis now available as Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans.
Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry Me Williams (London and New York:
Routledge, 2001).

INDEX

Abschattungen 13, 23

actions, constitution of xxiii, 26-7

acts:

reflective 17;

unreflected 17
amour-propre 17, 18
anguish xxvii, 46, 48-9,51
apodictic evidence xii, xiv, xix
Aristotle 18
Arland, Marcel 38

bad faith xviii, xxi
Balzac, Honore de 25

(S ill i.) xvi, xviii,

being and seeming 22
Bergson, Henri xxv, 34, 37
Boutroux, Emile 2
Brentano, Franz x
Brochard, Victor 2
Brunschvicg, Leon 43, 50

Cartesian Meditations (Husscrl) xix, 7, 49,
50

certainty 15, 23
Christianity xxiv-xxv
Cogito:

Cartesian 9;

Husserl's 9;

J and consciousness in 41-2;
as reflective consciousness 9-16

absolute viii, xv-xvi, xx, 50, 51;
active 26;

of consciousness 7-8;

Husserl's definition 5;
I and xv, xxvi, 49;
impersonal xv, 51;

45;

of itself xx, 10, 18;
non- positional 10;
phenomenological conception 7;
positional xx;

reflected 10, 15, 16;

reflecting 10-11,16;

reflective 8, 9-16, 39,41;

Sartre's conception of viii;

second-order 30;

spontaneous xvi, 26, 42, 46;

states as transcendent unities of 21-6;

thetic 18;

totality of 39;

transcendental 2-3, 4-5, 14, 15, 46;

transparency of xv-xvi;

unity and individuality 6;

unreflected 16, 19-21, 30;

unreflective xxi, 8, 16
creation xxv, 32-3, 46, 48
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) ix

de Beauvoir, Simone xii
degeneration xxvi, 35
degradation xxvi, 35, 37, 40
Dcrrida, Jacques xx
Descartes, Rene xi, xii, 9, 27, 42
desire 18, 19, 20
disgust 25-6
distinctness, lack of 37

42

INDEX 43

doubt xi, 23, 27, 42
dubitability 23, 31

Ego:

appearance 46;
conslitulion of actions 26 7:
constitution of the xxiii-xxvi, 21;
constitution as pole of actions, states,
and qualities 28-41;
function of 48;

I and consciousness in the Cogito 41-
2;

I and me 20-1 ;

ideal unity of all states and actions 39;

intuitive 41;

passivity 33, 35;

psychical 28, 41;

psychological xiv-xv;

pure xiii, xiv-xv, xx;

qualities as optional unities of states 27-

8;

role xxiii;
spontaneity 33^1;

states as transcendent unities of 21-6,
27;

transcendence of the ix-x, xxiii, xxviii,
31-2

emanation xxiv-xxv, 26, 32
Fink on 15, 49;

Husserl's use of term xi-xii, xiii, 4;
Sartre on xv, xix, xxiii, xxvii, 4, 14, 50;

Erlebnisse 13, 23-4, 26, 27, 35, 39-40
existence, absolute 45

Fink, Eugen 15,49

Formale und Transzendentale Logik

(Husserl) 50
freedom 47

Freud, Sigmund viii, xx, 25

hatred xviii, xxiii-xxiv, 21-6, 32, 44
Heidegger, Martin viii, xxii, 3 1
Husserl, Edmund:

Heidegger's relationship with xxii;

phenomenological philosophy vii, x-
xiii,4,49;

Sartre's critique of xiii-xx, xxviii, 4-9,
10, 11, 13, 14, 16-17, 29,37, 50;
Sartre's relationship with viii, ix, xii-

concept 41;

and consciousness in the Cogito 41-2;
existence 15-16;

as formal structure of consciousness
16;

and me 20-1;

primary structure of consciousness 49;
of reflected consciousness 15;
of reflective consciousness 15;
theory of the formal presence of the 2-
9;

transcendent 16;

transcendental xiii, xv, 3, 5, 7;

of transcendental consciousness 15
idealism 50-1
Ideas (Husserl) 5, 14
indistinctness 37
inner life xvii-xviii, 43
instantaneous, concept of the xix
intentionality 6
intentions 39
intimacy 37, 38, 40,41
introspection xvii-xviii, 24, 39

consciousness and 45;
of the Ego 31, 32, 39;
Husserl on 4;
I grasped by 9, 11, 15, 16;
state grasped by 44;
thinking grasped by 9, 11
inwardness 6, 36-7, 41, 44, 45

Janet, Pierre 47

Kant, Immanuel ix, 2-4, 10, 16
knowledge xvi

La Rochefoucauld, Francois de 17, 20

44 INDEX

le Bon, Sylvie xx

Logisclic Uiitersuclumgeii (Husserl) 5
love 8, 44

magic xxv-xxvi, 33, 35
magical relations xxiii-xxiv, 26
materialism xxviii, 5 1

conception of 45;
land 20-1;

consciousness and xxiv, 26;

as production of consciousness 5;

psycho-physical 4-5, 28-9;

theory of the material presence of the

16-21;

unknown 38;

World and 51-2
memory:

intuition based on 9;

non-reflected 12;

reflecting in 10;

reflective 12-13;

retrieval of experience xxi-xxii;

spontaneous xxii;

of unreflected consciousness 12
motivation 42
mystics 37

Nausea (Sartre) xii
nothing 43

object-pole 29

On the Phenomenology of the

Consciousness oflntenal Time (Husserl)
6-7,9

other minds, problem of xxvi, 50

participation 35
passivity 33, 35, 46
personality 5
phenomenologists 51
phenomenology:

essential principle 10;

existentialized xxvi-xxviii;

Husserl's x-xiii, 4;

as 'refuge doctrine' 51;

role xvi;

Sartre's interest in vii, xxii-xxiii;
objects 44;

as study of consciousness 4;

without reflection xxi-xxiii
pity 18-19
Plato 49
positing xi, xxi
procession xxv, 33
Proust, Marcel 25
psychical, the 4-5, 28, 41
psychoanalysis viii, xxvii
psychology 1, 20, 24, 25, 28, 45
psycho-physical, the 4-5, 28-9, 41

qualities:

constitution of xxiii;

as optional unities of states 27-8

reality 2

Recherches Philosophiqucs v ii
reflection:

criticisms of xvii;

impure xviii-xix, 23-4;

non-transparency of xvi xxi;

phenomenological xxii;

phenomenology without xxi-xxiil;

power of 21-2;

pure xviii-xix, xx, 23-4
religious vocabulary xxiv-xxv
representations 43, 51
revulsion xix, 22
Rimbaud, Arthur 46

Sein und Zeit (Heidegger) 3 1
self:

conception of viii;
constitution xiv-xv;
discovery xvii;
knowledge xxi, 38;
love of 17;
psychological xiii;
psycho-physical xiii;
understanding xxv
sincerity xviii

Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions

(Sartre) xxvi
solipsism xxvi, 50
Spinoza, Baruch 7
spontaneity:

consciousness xxiv, xxvii, 26, 35, 42;

of the Ego 33-4, 35;

impersonal 46;

individuated 46;

involuntary 48;

memory xxii;

phenomenological description of 48;
pure 45;

of reflected consciousness 25;
voluntary 48;
will and 47

constitution of xxiii;
as objects 44;

qualities as optional unities of 27-8;

as transcendent unities of

consciousness 21-6
subject-object duality 51
subject-pole 29
subjectivity, nature of xxiv

Textbook of Psychology (Titchener) 12
thetic:

actxxi, 10;

consciousness 18
Time and Free Will (Bergson) 34
Titchener, E.B. 12
transcendence:

from above 14;

inwardness and 36;

transcendental:

field 43;

sphere 45
transparency:

of consciousness xv-xvi;

reflective attitude and xvii

unconscious 18, 19, 46
unity of phenomena 48

INDEX 45

will, the 47
witchcraft xxv
World, the 30,51-2
World War II xxviii

War ' Diaries (Sartre) viii, x, xviii